A couple of weeks ago, I took my 12-year-old daughter to the town library in search of something to read. When I asked the librarian in charge of the YA section to recommend something without suicide or sex, she said, without hostility but quite firmly that we were in the wrong section.
She goes on to review For Steam and Country: Book One of the Adventures of Baron von Monocle.
I am currently reading this book and greatly enjoying it. More and more my source of books is often independently published ones. The publishing gatekeepers, for the most part, seem to want to promote preachy SJW tracts disguised as novels.
“As writer Walker Percy cracked about vapid contemporary Christian novelists, they’ve sold their birthright for “a pot of message.” Unfortunately this is also now true of secular writers. I wouldn’t mind message fiction as much if there was actually craft in the storytelling, instead the story is subservient to the “message”.
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That is exactly why I wrote the SAGA… er I mean I am WRITING the SAGA.
There are 13 books in the series, three short-story collections and a separate novel – and there is more under development. (not ready for any new releases as yet, alas.)
Don’t you want to know why the Pope went to the Moon?
Also: The only sex even implied is the married couples. The only suicide which occurs was by some wicked men who had just tried to desecrate a church but were stopped, and did not want to get interrogated by the good guys. There is NONE of the “force-fit the catechism into a fake thing that no normal human could consider a Story” sort of writing, and also none of the check-off-the current yelling point in social/ecclesial e-chatter. but there IS good and evil… and prayer as well as new-fashioned fun and PLENTY of tech and lit’ry references. No wonder all the recent popes have reinstated the Index just for the satisfaction of putting my books on it!
Also there are now 13 non-fiction texts out, including both fun tech and religious monographs, one of which settles the good old “does P equal NP?” debate. Chesterton, Greek and Latin, biblical citations, and so on. Medieval in the best sense. Lots of fun, if you dare.
See
http://DeBellisStellarum.blogspot.com
if you want to know more
And don’t forget: “Somebody has to do the hard jobs.”