Doing It -- Melvin Burgess

This one makes Forever look like Junie B. Jones.

A while back, Collomia and I had a conversation about how we were so used to reading YA books that the sex scenes in grown-up books kind of freaked us out. Well. I've got the YA book to change all that—Doing It, by Melvin Burgess. There's been a LOT of uproar about this one—Anne Fine, in particular, wrote a scathing (and in my opinion, completely unfair) review of it in the Guardian. (Which is unfortunate, because I really like her books). Lots of people are defending it, too. On the back of the american edition, there is a quote from a review in The Scotsman:

Anybody who takes the trouble to read the book, rather than just recoil from the smutty quotes, will find that it is a geniunely moral work of fiction about a subject—the confusions, joys and terrors of adolescent male sexuality—rarely addressed with such comprehension or sympathy.

I thought it was a great book—it was funny, yeah, but mostly, it was honest. I think that the people that are freaking out about it either don't remember their teens AT ALL, or they had extremely, extremely sheltered childhoods. (Mine was pretty damn sheltered, and there were A LOT of scenes in the book that brought up some pretty vivid memories. And no, I'm not telling which scenes).

Comments

[Emilia]

Wow, that's some news! So "smutty quotes" can turn a book into a "a geniunely [quote] moral work of fiction"! And I thought good quotes would do the job... (By the way, I think you guys are lunatics.)