Starters by Lissa Price

As we approach Banned Books Week, it's interesting to examine the main reasons that a book is considered offensive. The Clean Reads List posted on the Reading Teens web site specifies that the chosen books have, "...little or no profanity or sexual content..." For many readers, the absence of profane language and sexual references is enough to make the book acceptable. These elements are fairly easy to measure. What is more nuanced is how the presence or absence of bad language and sex is treated in the book. Let's look at some clean and...unclean? novels and see what pushes a book over the line into offensive territory.

Starters by Lissa Price
After a biological weapon wipes out everyone between the ages of 20 - 60, survivors are either young (Starters) or old (Enders.) Sixteen year-old Callie and her little brother, Tyler, are barely surviving in the squalor left to the parentless Starters. This is a very violent exsistence. Callie, Tyler, and Callie's friend Michael are forced to squat in desolate buildings, always prey for gangs or government marshalls. It's the marshalls that smoke them out of their tiny room, and marshalls that "ZipTazor" kids who try to evade capture.

Violence is heavy, as noted at Parental Book Reviews . But the nature of the violence - adults and government agencies that hunt down young people - that is not addressed as offensive. Partly this could be because the majority of young adult novels need a plot that gets rid of parental supervision; otherwise, kids wouldn't have such exciting adventures. It is a message that is rarely challenged as offensive, however.

The Enders have a racket going that allows them to "rent" a teenage body for a specific period of time. Why would an old person want to look young again? Perhaps to get another chance at a tennis game, but also another chance at wearing cute dresses or showing off six-pack abs. Indeed, Callie goes to Club Rune later in the book, where she meets an Ender inhabiting a young body. This woman is wearing stilletto heels and a glittery dress, "...so short it should have been a blouse. Maybe it was." That sounds pretty sexy. So although there is only one chaste kiss in the book, which earns it a clean rating, there is definitely an undercurrent of sexual energy. Exploitive sexual energy.

As far as language goes, Starters has only one "damn." That's pretty clean.