Last week, PEN America announced this year’s list of most banned books in high school libraries, and “A Clockwork Orange,” by Anthony Burgess, is number one. I remember reading the novel on my own when I was in ninth grade — the thrill of how the fictional slang, so jarring at first, started to make sense as I immersed myself in it. It was exciting, discovering that language could do that. The copy I’ve had since high school still sits on my bookshelf like an old friend.
Cog contributor Hannah Harlow knows books. She’s a publishing industry veteran and co-owner of The Bookshop of Beverly Farms, an independent bookstore. (Some of my own favorite books have come from Hannah’s recommendations.) The first week in October is Banned Books Week, and it prompted Hannah to write about her younger son’s love of dragons, how following his interest helped him gain a foothold in reading, and the unexpected realm it took them both to this past summer. We’re sharing an excerpt below, and you can follow the link to read the rest.
– Sara Shukla
My son has never met a book about dragons he doesn’t like. It began in elementary school with an obsession with the Wings of Fire series by Tui Sutherland. (The graphic novel versions were preferable, well into middle school.)
Up until then, reading had been his worst subject. “At least he’s great at math!” one teacher said during a parent conference in third grade. “Maybe we should just focus on that.” This, at the exact age we need not to not give up on our kids and reading. Ongoing studies by Scholastic show that both reading for enjoyment and frequency of reading decline drastically as kids age. As a publishing industry veteran and now bookstore owner, I am also well aware of the gender gap in reading— with girls reading almost twice as much as boys— and I was determined not to let either of my sons become a statistic. I figured, if he was a late bloomer when it came to physical growth, why couldn’t he be a late bloomer when it came to reading?
In addition to the Wings of Fire series, for a long time my son was reading other graphic novel series — Dog Man, Bad Guys, Baby-sitters Club — and listening to audiobooks from the Spy School series by Stuart Gibbs on repeat. Then suddenly, in seventh grade, it was all dragons all the time. He discovered the Eragon series by Christopher Paolini. He listened to “Dragon Rider” by Cornelia Funke. We read “Impossible Creatures” by Katherine Rundell side-by-side. He read an advance copy of “Dragonborn” by Struan Murray for me: “It’s good, Mom, you should order it for the store” (publishing October 14 — it’s going to be big!). He was insatiable.
A selection of books featuring dragons at The Bookshop of Beverly Farms, 2025. (Courtesy Hannah Harlow)
During this period, I happened to be reading “Fourth Wing” by Rebecca Yarros (and in quick succession the sequels, “Iron Flame” and “Onyx Storm”). My son saw the dragon on the cover. “Is that a dragon book? Why didn’t you tell me about it?” he asked.
It hadn’t even occurred to me to tell him about it. “Well,” I admitted, “it’s pretty spicy,”
“Spicy? Do you mean sexy? Why didn’t you just say ‘sexy’?”
I didn’t know. “I just think you should wait until you’re a little older,” I said, when really I was thinking about how the two main characters break a lot of furniture when they orgasm. Would he expect too much from future relationships if his first introduction to sex on the page was this, ahem, explosive? (Had he encountered sex on the page already? How much?)
He seemed fine with this plan. Until a few months later, in the summer between seventh and eighth grade, when he announced that he had found a new dragon series.
“Have you heard of ‘Fourth Wing?’” he asked. “It’s so good.”
Apparently he’d forgotten we’d ever talked about it. Or maybe he never registered the name of the book I was reading. I picked up where we’d left off:
“I know, I’ve read it. I thought maybe you should wait.”
“Why?”
“It’s just, things get pretty serious,” I said, still not mentioning the furniture. “If you have any questions about anything, you’ll let me know, right?”
I texted a group of friends who I knew had loved “Fourth Wing,” too, and explained what was happening. I thought it was funny, and perhaps a little concerning that my 13-year-old son was reading this book. One friend also found it hilarious. One friend asked if I was going to let him continue.
My response could only be one thing: I don’t ban books.
I was going to let him continue. The real question was how.
A view of bookshelves inside The Bookshop of Beverly Farms. (Courtesy Hannah Harlow)
For the past few years, my brother and I have hosted a podcast called John Updike’s Ghost (we also own the bookstore together). Last February, we had a guest on the show, Sabrina Baeta, senior program manager on the Freedom to Read team at PEN America, an organization founded by authors more than 100 years ago to protect the freedom of expression. On our podcast we talk about what books we’ve been reading, and for this special episode we all chose at least one banned book to read. One of the books I read was “A Court of Mist and Fury,” book two in Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series, which contains some of the most banned books in recent years.
After my son picked up “Fourth Wing,” I went back and listened to that episode. I heard myself say: “We shouldn’t be monitoring when kids are interested in reading about sex. They’re going to come to it at different times, and I personally would love for my kids to pick up a sex positive book that has a strong female protagonist.”
Be careful what you wish for, I guess.
But then, Sabrina had chimed in with a lot of ideas that I was having trouble articulating, both at the time and now with my son. Whether it’s sex, violence or any big, emotional topic, “the softest introduction is through a book,” she said. Take, for example, how we want kids to know what consent looks like, how to deal with it. They also need to understand what sex even is.
Load YouTube video
Our conversation reminded me that that’s exactly what I want for my kids. As the parents of boys, my husband and I have been hammering home the idea of consent since our kids’ births. They’re certainly not seeing it in the movies we’ve been showing them from our own 1980s childhoods. But they can see it in “Fourth Wing,” and the books by Sarah J. Maas, and many others that are all too often predominantly being read by women. (Forget about teenagers, think about all that men could be learning!)
Sabrina went on to say, “It gives [students] the tools and the language to be able to speak about those experiences with partners, with different people, or with trusted adults … It helps open that door to that further discussion.”
I revisited our “Fourth Wing” conversation — because I decided the how of my son reading whatever suits his fancy is to keep an open line of communication. I told him my concern with him reading “Fourth Wing” was that he was skipping a couple of steps between Spy School and adult Romantasy books. He reminded me he’s also been reading a lot of young adult books recently, and maybe I didn’t realize how much happened in those books?
“Good point, but you know how a lot of furniture breaks in the books?” I asked with a wink, wink, finally addressing the thing that was really bothering me. He reddened. I forged ahead. “Well, that’s because the characters have this powerful magic, right? It’s not necessarily like that in real life.”
“Mom, I know.”
“Just making sure! Remember, you can always stop listening if you get to a part that makes you uncomfortable. Or just skip ahead.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. He wasn’t interested in talking about the sex, though. He wanted to rehash the battle scenes.
Kids mature at different rates — that’s true for puberty and when they want to learn about bodies and sexual health — and that’s true for brain development and reading skills, too. If we give up on our children before they have a chance to develop an interest in reading for themselves, we’re failing them. And if we try to control books like they are substances, if we never trust children in the first place, then we are not giving them the tools they need to face the experiences they will encounter as adults. My son may never cross paths with a dragon, but the books he chooses to read keep doors open to ideas and conversations he deserves to be able to explore, if and when he’s ready.