I wish authors and publishers would be more concerned with quality than with ripping off other writers with a sub-par retelling that ticks all the “woke” boxes.
This book was horrifically awful. I’m not even sure how these people can sleep at night knowing the liberties they took with Montgomery’s beloved characters: Anne and Diana are lesbian lovers, and Gilbert is an intolerant bully.
How they can legally take characters from another author and reinvent them as something completely different, and still claim the original work is beyond me. I understand the public domain, but does it allow it to this extent?!
This influx of mediocrity for money and agendas is destroying so much of the beauty and goodness of children and middle-grade literature. In our own library, these books are what are being promoted most heavily on the shelves, to the exclusion of all else.
I listened to a recent episode of 10 Things To Tell You, in which a librarian was interviewed about what she wanted people to know, and one of the things mentioned was that librarians are not trying to trick children into finding inappropriate material (44:01), and while I agree that may be true of most librarians, there are certainly those who see the library shelves as the premier battleground for their own personal values and beliefs.
In my years of working in libraries and studies of Library Science, juvenile books were traditionally for 8-12 year olds. The current trend is now that “J” means 7-18 years old. In what modern publishing is there any similarity of interest between a 7-year-old and an 18-year-old? There is none. So why the push to create books geared more toward the 18, while marketing them for the 7 year old?
There are so many questionable practices that are gaining traction in the book world, that are ultimately growing our children up much faster than is healthy for them. And yes, unfortunately, the almighty dollar is the motivation behind all of it, without regard to the actual children being affected.
I don’t imagine it is every public library, but our’s seems to have a particular bent toward the promotion of such works. To the point that I no longer allow my children to wander the library, because even within the children’s section there are front-facing books actively promoting gender and liberal ideology. But try to find a Christian author or a book with more conservative views and it doesn’t exist within our library’s walls.
I am not in favor of banning books from public libraries, but I certainly believe in not actively promoting materials that are deemed potentially controversial, particularly when it comes to children. Have the books, by all means, but that doesn’t mean that these books need to be placed at the forefront.
What has been your experience with your own library? A healthy balance of different opinions and views, or a heavy leaning one way to the exclusion of the other?
