At some point, I have to go to my parents' house and deal with my other book collection-- the one that hasn't travelled with me through the years, the ones that served Kid Me and Teen Me well, but that 22-year-old me didn't have room for right away in my new life. But now that my parents are approaching senior citizenhood and I'm cruising toward middle age, it's probably time to finally get all my crap out of their house.
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| This was probably my favourite of them all. Source: Goodreads. |
This isn't Sweet Valley High, where the girls did things like sleep around and murder people; these books are set when they were in middle school, younger and relatively innocent. I collected a whole bunch of them in 5th-6th grade, as did many of my classmates. They don't have a lot of redeeming qualities in terms of literary merit, although occasionally the twins did learn from their mistakes (but usually everything just worked out exactly liked they wanted it to, so not a lot of learning opportunity). I'm thinking of taking them to one of the many Little Free Libraries in town, and that brings me to my question:
If you saw these books in the wild, would you cover your children's eyes and run away screaming?
Obviously, the folks most qualified to answer this are anyone who was in the right age group to read these when they were popular--middle schoolish in the late 80s and early 90s--and who also have children who might be affected by Sweet Valley exposure, but as I said, I'm happy to hear from anyone. After all, there's part of me that wants to use these books for kindling rather than let any young eyes near them. But maybe I'm missing something. What say you?
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