Sometimes, when I get bored, I read Amazon reviews.

[conuly]

The ones on Blubber are great. Some of them make good points, but they're so caught up in their own SHOCK and HORROR that they're utterly useless. (Especially the ones who claim that the book is unrealistic because a. kids in the fifth grade don't act that way or b. the bullies never get caught. You might criticize the book for portraying this, sure, you might prefer a neater ending where everybody is friends or where the mean girls get what's coming to them, got it - but that doesn't mean it'll be more realistic that way.)

But my favorite runs like this.

A woman's daughter was reading Blubber, came to a point where one character calls another a "bitch", showed the page to her mother and said "I don't think I should be reading this", whereupon the woman came to amazon to complain that NOW she had to READ all these BOOKS before giving them to her daughter, and WHO has the TIME!!!

To which I say:

1a. Your daughter clearly already knew the word "bitch" or she would not have been able to identify it in writing.
1b. She also knew that one doesn't use that word in polite conversation.
1c. And she ALSO decided she should not read books using this sort of language.
2. Blubber is not exactly a weighty tome. And yes, if you intend to censor your child's reading, you need to make it a point to be familiar with WHAT they are reading. It's not the author's job to guess what sort of books you won't let your kid read. (My parents didn't censor our reading, but they read most books we read, and why not?)

I mean, here's what I don't get. It's one thing to say "I don't want to teach my child that word" or even "I don't want to create the false impression that I think that language is okay". But she's already succeeded at that! What on earth is she worried about at this point? (For the record, the main character takes the time to explain that her parents don't mind about language so long as they don't go screaming it around the house. This is a perfectly valid parenting philosophy, and the kid is aware that it'd be a bad idea to call her teacher a bitch to her face, which is just about all we can hope for when it comes to profanity. At some point you can't duct tape their mouths anymore.)

Comments

[lady-angelina.livejournal.com]

How sad that the kid is actually more savvy than her mother. =/ And bullying in the fifth grade unrealistic? In what universe? I wonder if these parents simply forgot what it was like to be in grade school (or, perhaps, were the perpetrators of the bullying themselves). Let me put it this way: I remember that when I was that age, I and a group of other kids teased this one girl mercilessly. I later felt so ashamed that when I ran into her some ten years later at a grocery store, I apologized for it. She was cool about it, but still... no one's immune, either on the giving or receiving end of the nastiness. =(

And yeah... I have had to learn to take reviews that were posted by the general public with a grain of salt, be it on Amazon or on McAfee's Site Advisor. The ones that say "worst/best ever" or proclaim that "you'll love/hate it, I swear" are among the worst offenders, IMHO. A good reviewer won't try to speak for others but will still give its opinion while being as objective as possible about the aspects they liked or disliked.

[conuly]

There is DEFINITELY a learning curve when using any sort of wrap. I won't blame anybody for being intimidated by it. (By the by, woven wraps FTW once your kid outgrows the Moby.) But yeah, once you get used to them it's not hard. Practice on a doll first.

[conuly]

There's one person maintaining in replies to every comment possible that it's not that bullying is unrealistic, it's that this bullying doesn't happen except with older kids and that at any rate, bullies like that get caught by the authorities.

When asked point-blank how he explains my life, though, he'll answer everybody BUT me.

[conuly]

No, I didn't think to. You can, you thought of it :)

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

When I was thirteen or fourteen, I had my mom special-order from a local bookstore, somebody's autobiography -- the son of a film star I liked. It turned out to be pretty sarcastic and nasty. Then he gets to his high school years and starts talking about a girl he knew, getting drearily and cynically explicit. It was what June Gibbons later called letting sex down. My reading material had rarely if ever been censored, and I liked explicit sex scenes, but only if they were erotic and well written, like soft porn.

So I took the book to my mom and said I didn't want it, it was cynical and cold and "not even the dirty parts were good and I don't want to read things like that". Mom tried to return it and the guy said it was a special order so they couldn't take it back, and why did she want to? She repeated my review. The guy said "Well, you can cut out the pages you don't want your child to read." He never did get it.

As far as Blubber, to me (and to all of us) the loveliest book ever written on that subject is Carrie by Stephen King.

[conuly]

CUT OUT the PAGES? OMG! It's not the book's fault it's been poorly written.