Urban lit: Too racy, or just too "uneven"?
School Library Journal's cover story this month is all about urban lit, and how it's become increasingly popular with teens, but not so much with librarians:
"The most troubling thing about street lit isn’t necessarily its graphic descriptions of sex, violence, and drugs or its occasional fondness for gangsta rap’s explicit language or even that it seemingly glamorizes thug life. No, what many librarians may wince at is the uneven quality
of its content."
If you're not too familiar with this genre, the article provides a full
retrospective from the pulp novels of the '50s and '60s to Sister Souljah's The Cold[...]