From: Erin Murphy <kitohana>
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 08:32:16 -0700

I am bothered when a YA novel pushes limits, and that is all that is discussed about it. That was the case for me with how i live now, by Meg Rosoff. Before it won the Printz Award, all the discussion I'd heard was about the first-cousin love relationship in it. After it won the award, I thought, there must be more to it than that, so I read it--and indeed, that relationship is just one part of the story, which is so much larger and more profound than one relationship, and so much smaller, too, in its focus on one troubled girl. I hadn't even heard that it was set in contemporary times and there's a war in England, which is pretty key (!) to the story. I had a sort of shrugging, so-what response to the love relationship in the bigger context of the war story, and I would think teen readers would be more inclined to discuss the war and how it plays out than whether the relationship was acceptable or not. Sometimes, as the gatekeepers for children's literature, I think we lose sight of the whole truth of a story in the face of the question, "How far is too far?"

 Murphy Literary Agent
Received on Thu 23 Jun 2005 10:32:16 AM CDT