I'm always on the lookout for books to tempt my ES. Since the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books were such a hit for his birthday, I thought I should keep my eye out for other books with graphic appeal. So, I snatched up this new comic anthology, called Stuck in the Middle: Seventeen Comics from an UNPLEASANT Age, edited by Ariel Schrag. I was hoping it would be something I could leave lying around and find ES peeking in the cover and cracking up. He hasn't noticed it and now that I have read it, I'll put it in the bag and take it back to the library.
It is definitely an accurate portrayal of the angst of the middle-school years. I appreciated that the comics were from a variety of cartoonists. However, I didn't think it was something I would want my middle-schooler to be reading. It was full of swearing and vulgarities. I'm sure there are those who would say that the cursing is realistic for the lives of middle-schoolers today. It may be true that my son encounters cursing, but I wouldn't want to pass a book onto him that was full of it (unless the value of the story really outweighed the cursing - an example would be The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, and I'm not ready to encourage him to read that yet, either).
I think the cartoons didn't have enough value or take-away to make me want to encourage my son to read them. There was no lesson to be learned. It was merely a faithful account of the many difficulties pre-teens face when navigating the waters of middle school. For adults who wish to look back on those years and remember, it might be a fun diversion, just not something I'm going to recommend to any middle-schoolers I know.
2 comments:
I appreciate your reviews and will steer clear of this one as well. It is such a frustration of mine that profanity and shock-effect one-liners or topics are included in tv shows, movies and books. Granted, this one doesn't seem to have great reader value anyway, but I think authors/screenwriters could do without. ~Karin
Yes, Karin, it especially pains me when there is a well-written book, but it is muddied by language and I don't feel comfortable recommending it to students I work with. Philip Beard is on my list of children/YA authors for his book "Dear Zoe." It was a tremendous book, but the ending puts me at a disadvantage because morally I wouldn't want to recommend the book. I could understand why he ended the book as he did, but I wondered, since it was for teens, why he didn't try to solve the dilemma in a different way.
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