Needing to Rant

I woke up in a bad mood today.  I am the epitome of cantankerous today.  Then I finished reading a book that did nothing to add to my mood.  So in order to appease my seething soul, I need to rant.  So please bear with me.

I just finished reading two books by Kristin Cashore, Graceling and Fire.  There is a third book in the series in progress right now too.  These books are marketed as young adult and the heroines of the books are in their late teens.  So now let me tell you some of the content of these books.  In Graceling the heroine speaks quite adamantly about how she will never get married because that's giving away her freedoms and her right to independence.  Of course the solution to this is to have a lover with no strings attached.  So that's what she does.  Teenager.  With a lover.  And they have sex in the book.  It's decribed.  Multiple times.  Not graphically, but described nonetheless.  And that's not all.  The bad guy?  Yeah, he likes to cut up small animals and young girls for pleasure, and it's implied that he does other things with those young girls as well.  So I wasn't a fan of these things in the first book, and I sure wouldn't let any young adult girl I know read it, but they were somewhat minor plot points, so I figured I'd read the second one.

It was worse.  The heroine of the second book has been having casual sex with her best friend, who is a guy, since the age of 15.  This same best friend goes on to impregnated a member of the royal family and the heroine's body guard, who is 15.  The hero of the book, who is a prince, got a stable girl pregnant at the age of 16, and he goes on to have sex with the heroine in the book.  There is sex left and right.  And again we have older men taking pleasure in younger girls, women having affairs and getting pregnant with other men's children and so on and so on.  I was ready to throw the book across the room multiple times.

And you know what's so sad about all this?  The stories in this book are very imaginative and creative.  The author is a good writer.  It's just too bad that she feels the need to shove her feminist viewpoints down the throats of young teenage girls.  I don't need a bitter female with obvious father figure issues (all the dads in the books are really messed up) teaching my daughters about how she thinks love and marriage (or the lack thereof) should work.  I'm disgusted and appalled that she feels she has the right to market these books as young adult.  I wouldn't have any problems if they were shelved in the adult section.  But they're not.  They are there for the taking by young teenage girls with pliable, impressionable minds.  It makes me sick.

So for those you with daughters, please don't let them read these books.  And if there was any way I could tell the author how sick I think she is, I probably would.  Unfortunately, the type of woman I imagine her to be, she'll just say that I'm the type of person she's writing the book about, the type of woman all these young girls need to avoid becoming at all costs.  I'm married (gasp!!) and didn't have sex until I was married (double gasp!!).  Do you think I could get the library to re-shelve her books as adult fiction?  It's worth a try, I guess.

But I feel better having ranted and raved, and I hope that maybe this keeps at least one young girl away from these trashy books!!