Kid-Lit and the New Orality

After Jim Kushiner’s anti-recommendation, I picked up a copy of Simon and Schuster’s new book for the teenage girl market, Rainbow Party by Paul Ruditis. As Jim mentioned, the book is about a group of high school girls planning a “party” in which they perform sexual favors for their male classmates.

The book is even more insidious than I first imagined. The heroine of the book is not the party-planner, but a saintly high school sex education teacher. Ms. Barrett is described as “more of a friend than a teacher.” She is the only one to whom all the students can talk about their sexuality. Unfortunately, the heroic Ms. Barrett is silenced after the head of the high school Chastity Club rats on her to the school board, which instructs Ms. Barrett to teach abstinence only in the classroom.

Ms. Barrett is vindicated when a gonnhorea epidemic hits the high school, an epidemic that could have been stopped if only Ms. Barrett had been allowed to give the right information about “protection” to the students. In the end, Ms. Barrett “valiantly” resigns rather than leave her students unprotected. Here she stands. She can do no other.

The antagonists in this book are the parents. Now, this is nothing new. “Parents just don’t understand” was a popular Will Smith pop-rap song when I was a teenager in the 1980s, and that theme has been omnipresent in kid-lit since at least World War II. But there is something different here. It is not simply that the parents are “outdated” in their morality, or out of touch with teen culture. In this book, the parents’ lack of understanding actually leads to the sickness and potential death of their teenage children.

And who will stand up for them? Why the public school sex education teacher, of course.