Jon Richfield answers “Is there any material in this book that...”

Megan asked this question about Flowers for Algernon:

Is there any material in this book that would make it inappropriate for a younger reader?

Jon Richfield Sorry about missing this question. It will be out of date by now, but in case anyone still wants my ha'porth, let me evade the question by referring t…moreSorry about missing this question. It will be out of date by now, but in case anyone still wants my ha'porth, let me evade the question by referring to something I wrote elsewhere in another connection (teaching children to read:
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If there are adult books lying about the house, and a child elects to read them, no problem. No real censorship is necessary. The parts that one might censor usually will pass the child by. At the age of six, one of ours found, read and re-read a paperback copy of “The Broken Sword”, a Nordic fantasy by Poul Anderson, full of violence, non-explicit sex, incest and so on. The book did not dwell on such things; it just happened to be based on material from a tragedy in Norse mythology, and it was consistently in character. It happened also to be a rattling good story, well written. (Well Anderson generally was very good, of course.) Incomprehensible items in the book, such as sex, the child apparently skimmed over as uninteresting.

One difficulty in later years was that by mid-primary school, they had exhausted the resources of the local public library's children's shelves. In the face of considerable resistance, we had to persuade the librarians to permit them into the adult section to select books for themselves. Again, there was no problem with their selection of books. The bad stuff generally is boring, and the children do not exude green saliva and grow fangs as soon as they encounter unsuitable material.
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Well, FFA is a lot less brutal than TBS. But I am rather less cowardly about answering children's questions than some people, though I am not inclined to push the information onto them. We supplied our children when they were still quite young, (six or eight?) with one or two books of sound physiological instruction, including sex; and one of our baby-sitters said wide-eyed when we got home: "You should be more careful; there are some books on sex on the bottom shelf where the children can reach them!" It took a while for her to digest our response that the reason for that was that it was their book!

Anyway, I would not dream of protecting a child from "Flowers for Algernon" at whatever age s/he chooses to read it independently. Frankly, I would regard the underlying tragedy as more trying than the sexual aspects. (less)

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Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

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