The Book & Reader forums is a place designed for users of all ages to discuss books. Within the forums of this website there is one forum described as being intended for children and young adult books. This forum seems to receive a limited amount of traffic. A search using the forum’s search feature revealed that since the beginning of the year there have been 33 posts. While some of these posts were written by adults, I also a detected several that appeared to have been written by teens. The forum does not require members to post their age; however, in older posts I noted that several teens mentioned their age. Posters are only able to be identified by as much information as they are willing to share, so it is difficult to determine …show more content…
Also, individuals on this forum often reply to original threads started years ago. Unlike some forums, this is actually encouraged by the staff members, but it makes following a thread difficult at times.
Compared to Traditional Reviews The reviews I read on the forum were less concerned with a succinct, comprehensive overview of the book like one would expect in a professional review on a site like Kirkus. Rather, they focused on an emotional attachment to the book as a reason to review or recommend it to others. For example, in a discussion on Charlotte’s Web, one individual explains that she hated the book because she was forced to read it several times in elementary school (evie, 2004). Although the opinions on the forum were hardly reviews in the professional sense of the word, I was surprised that they so frequently included some sort of visceral reaction to the book. Often there was little explanation concerning the particulars of the story and the author chose to focus instead on the fact that a main character made them angry or that the ending was unexpected or happy. It is difficult to determine which review has the greater authority. If an individual were simply trying to discern whether the plot would be interesting, then certainly a professional review would be more authoritative. However, the conversational reviews I read between friends reminded me of the power of a personal opinion. While
Some might claim the YA genre has grown to be too dark for its target audience. Meghan Gurdon, a firm believer of this idea, explains why she believes this in her article, “Darkness Too Visible”. Gurdon describes the experience of a mother of three in a bookstore looking to purchase a YA novel for one of her children, when she found herself leaving the bookstore empty-handed due to the content of the teen books. While teen books decades ago contained less violent/corrupted material, times have changed along with the genre. She is concerned that these books could have an effect on these young readers’ brains as they are merely transferring from childhood to adulthood. Gurdon still has faith that YA books would sell just as well and connect with young readers today without all of the dark subject matters discussed in them these days.
It is well known that books read by adolescents are somewhat inappropriate in certain ways such as language and the types of actions done by the characters. Some books consist of drugs, sex, and violence which obviously isn’t very appropriate nor does it consist of
Bored, to be weary and impatient because one lacks interest in one`s current activity. As the definition implies, to be bored is to lose interest in what you are doing. As this sense of boredom can only come when one is only doing the same activity for an extended period of time, I agree that teenagers today are too busy to be bored.
According to the American Library Association (ALA), young adult novels are challenged with the best intentions. In most cases a parent will read a book that their child might be reading in class to find out if the book is hazardous to their child’s well-being. If the novel seems problematic, the parent then challenges the book. Even though the purpose of challenging a novel is to keep children from reading about issues that may not be seen as appropriate for their age group, censoring children from difficult subject matter is not always the solution. There is always controversy when difficult issues arise in adolescent geared novels. Even though there are many concerns with Lois Lowry’s The Giver,
In her speech, and the article, titled “The Case for Good Taste in Children’s Books,” Meghan Cox Gurdon addresses the controversy on Young Adult Literature. Throughout her speech at Hillsdale College she labels this current category of fiction as gaudy, inappropriate, and sacrilegious. Gurdon’s claim on the content of YA, for Young Adult, books obtains effectiveness through her ability to incorporate real world examples, the claim made by the opposing view, and a moral push.
reviews can appeal to all ages that have the ability to read. Movie reviews generally have one
The reviews I found were from those who have read the book. Here are just a few of what I found:
1.1 Explain why working in partnership with others is important for children and young people
Anyone who has worked with children will agree that they are very impressionable. Even young adults are influenced by the media, literature, peers, money, and paradigms which is why parents and guardians would also agree that any impressionable source their children come in contact with should include desirable, good-natured content, such as life lessons and morals. In the past two decades, Harry Potter, a famous work of J.K. Rowling, has become increasingly popular and well known, but sensations also come with reproaches from strong willed adults that claim simple fictional details are consuming and corrupting their children. Parents and guardians believe that Harry Potter should be banned from use in schools and libraries, but they don’t
When picking my adolescent I had quite a few choices to pick from but I decided on my adolescent 15 year old sister since I know a lot about her and have seen first-hand how she is coping with this adolescent stage. Patricia is a normal 15 year old girl still in high school. She lives in a household of 7 with 3 older siblings and one younger one. She mentioned that she lived in a small home with three dogs, two fish, a bird and six other humans. Both her parents are field workers so they aren’t really at home much. Patricia has a younger 7 year old sister that she pays attention to a lot, they have a really close relationship, and she cares for her younger
Communities are all about groups of individuals who share something in common. This makes going on the internet seem like an odd way to find more communities, form new ones, or strengthen pre-existing ones. The internet however is full of communities. Communities can be based upon religion, location, ethnicity, an interest, or a personal matter. The internet itself is “a global distributed data communications network” (Kirmayer, Raikhel, & Rahimi, 2013, p. 166). This is what makes the internet so full of communities because communication is the key to putting multiple individuals with commonalities into communication, which is the basis of any community. Online communities differ from communities that exists off the web in a couple of
The question people should be asking is, “Why are books subjective?”, “What makes one book better than the other?”, or “What makes one book worse than the other?” These are all valid questions. For some people, a book is better because the content. Harper Lee’s, To Kill A Mockingbird, shows this by her characters. She has a set of 4-6 characters that her story surrounds. You start off with Atticus Finch and his two children, Jem Finch and Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch. As the story progress there are two main plot lines. One with Boo Radley, a big man who people think has homicidal tendencies and Tom Robinson, a black man who is being accused of rape by the racist white people living in the town. There were multiple plot points that made you think. It made readers think of about how society has not really change. Society still judges before actually knowing. William Shakespeare’s, MacBeth, does not do that for everyone. Neither does To Kill A Mockingbird, probably. The audience that reads MacBeth, does not get the same message. It could be a completely different message. That does not take away from the idea that it cannot communicate the specific messages that a person may
Book reviews are just that: a review of a book. They can be used for news articles, blogs, or academic journals. A book review is more than just a book report. It can give the reader more of an insight into not just the book, but the author as well. Most authors write of what they know. For example, some authors have backgrounds in law enforcement so they write about cases they know or have worked. Other authors research groups of people, for example the Knights Templar, and write of what they have learned. Others yet develop a hypothesis and write of what they discovered, proving or disproving their hypothesis. It is important to remember which genre you are interested in when reading a book review. You may find that because of
In this modern era everyone is very into social media. Social media has become a part and parcel of everyone’s life. Even kindergarden students have at least a little knowledge on social media. Social media is defined as a relationship that exist between network and people. A very common and widely used example of social media would be web sites for social networking and microblogging. Examples of utmost used social networking sites are “ Facebook ˮ and “ Twitter ˮ. Nowadays coming across kids on social networking sites has become a norm. Social media is used for many purposes which are to exchange ideas, feelings, personal information, pictures and videos. Social networking sites is one of the most preferable medium for expressing
Education is an important part of people’s lives; it will either make them or break them in the future depending on the careers they choose. Education is greatly diverse today in comparison to the 1950s because of advancements in teaching and other great inventions that provide easier techniques of teaching. One major issue that has been raised is distant learning courses and online education.