In August, your humble Scrapbook noted an alarming New York magazine article about how the world of teenage novels is now rife with “culture cops, monitoring their peers across multiple platforms for violations.”
The bar for political correctness in young adult (YA) fiction has only gotten higher. The most recent victim of the left-wing pitchfork brigades is author Laura Moriarty, who fell afoul of the thought police even as she tried to be as progressive as progressive can be. Her new book, American Heart, is at the center of a nasty little kerfuffle. The book takes place in a dystopian future America. It is about a girl from Missouri who goes on a long trek to Canada to help a young Muslim girl escape being rounded up into an internment camp.
Kirkus Reviews at first gave American Heart a rave, calling the book a “moving portrait of an American girl discovering her society in crisis, desperate to show a disillusioned immigrant the true spirit of America.”
What is there for progressives to find wrong with that? A lot, it seems.
Cue the social-media outcry that the story of a Muslim girl was told from the point of view of her “white” friend. Online torch-bearers denounced the non-Muslim author for appropriating a Muslim issue.
Kirkus cravenly retracted the review, and apologized for not calling out the book’s “white savior narrative” that so offended. This even though the original positive review had been written, as Kirkus desperately pointed out, by “an observant Muslim person of color.”
Dystopian works remain all the rage in YA fiction. In this age of online shame mobs, it’s pretty clear why the theme of horrible societal breakdown is so resonant.D
