Because my novels deal with families in crisis, and more times than not feature adolescent children trying to cope with circumstances beyond their ken, Nathan’s Run and At All Costs have found their way to many middle school and high school libraries. So strong is the attractiveness to younger readers that the American Library Association honored both of these titles with their prestigious Alex Award, placing them among the ten “best” adult-market titles for young adult readers.

Since then, I have received hundreds of letters from fans who loved the books, and from dozens of others who would have liked the books, but felt that the “foul language” and the “graphic violence” make them inappropriate for children.

A recent e-mail posed the following: “I am a Reading Specialist in an urban high school. My students are reading at least three to four years below grade level and . . . I believe that having [them] read Nathan' s Run would be an experience that they would never forget ... My concern, is of course, the language, not that the language isn't what they, and I hear every day walking around the halls. However, saying it and reading it in a classroom situation are two very different things.”

Hmm…

My son, Chris, was nine years old at the time I wrote Nathan’s Run, and he was already losing interest in the vapid plot lines that passed for what I would call “boys’ fiction.” He wanted action and characters he could identify with, and Goosebumps just weren’t doing it for him anymore. Moreover, to my chagrin, he’d decided that a Newberry Medal on the cover identified a book as literary broccoli – stuff his parents said he’d like if he only gave it a chance.

It’s frustrating to have an advanced reader and a young-adult library.

Truth be told, I didn’t write Nathan’s Run for his age group, but that didn’t stop him from enjoying it. We even had a talk about the profanity. I told him there was a vast difference between reality and fiction, and that there’d be big trouble if I ever heard him confusing words he could read with words he may say. He understood completely. And why wouldn’t he? It’s not a complicated issue.

Nathan’s Run is the story of a 12-year-old boy thrust into a world where childhood innocence is punished. He’s a prisoner in a juvenile detention center where guards and peers alike are predators, and he’s wholly unprepared to fend for himself. The juvenile detention center in the book reflects exactly what I saw and heard in my research. If the description of the place and the people are appalling to some readers, then so be it; I found them appalling in real life.

It’s the very harshness of Nathan’s conditions that make his triumph so memorable to readers, and his character so vivid. I want readers to feel squirmy as they vicariously live his life. Without the harshness of the evil, there’d be less color to his goodness.

And Nathan is fundamentally good. He’s polite and he’s resourceful. He never loses the thread of optimism that keeps him from becoming what his captors want all of their inmates to be: faceless, silent automatons who respect the “system’ more than they respect each other. Does he cuss? He spent nine months in prison, for crying out loud. Of course he cusses.

They’re only words, after all: nouns and verbs that are devoid of meaning until they’re stitched together to form sentences that must be read in context. And in Nathan’s Run in particular, the context of the story is something of considerable value to kids who feel as if they have no voice in the world.

Let’s talk a little bit about violence now.

A grandfatherly gentleman recently told me at a “Friends of the Library” luncheon in rural Virginia that At All Costs was the most violent book he’d ever read. He went on to hold me obliquely (and inexplicably) accountable for the Columbine shootings. I changed the subject before he got around to my role in JFK’s murder.

This particular guy was obviously a nutcase, but his comments triggered a very interesting discussion on violence in books and on film. Truth be told, I wouldn’t qualify my books as violent, at least not in terms of the growing trend toward what I call violence-as-pornography. I write thrillers, so of course people get hurt, but every act of violence has a visceral consequence.

Fifteen years in the fire service exposed me to all manner of violence—shootings, stabbings, beatings, you name it. I know first-hand that people scream when they’re hurt, that they stink when they bleed. Sometimes, it’s so ugly that you just want to turn away. But as it was my job back then to stay focused on the task hand, so, too, is it my job to keep you from turning away. Otherwise, I would be glorifying the violence; I’d be showing injury and death as something less horrific than they really are. How would anyone be better served?

As I write this, I’m aware of at least three school districts that are being urged to ban my books from school libraries. In at least two of the three cases, the petitioners admit that they have never actually read the books, but that they have seen naughty words on the page. One lady in Pennsylvania went so far as to count the number of “objectionable” words in Nathan’s Run. There are 409 of them, I’m told, although no one can give me firm reading on whether “hell” was counted as an objectionable word, or merely as an objectionable place.

Am I the only one who finds this image disturbing? If you’re going to beg a school board to play the Farenheit 451 game, shouldn’t you at least have the decency to read the books you’re planning to burn? There’s something deeply twisted about an adult who has nothing better to do with her time than thumb through a novel in search of potty words – and then tally them. Yuck.

Yet, such people are the constituency of teachers, librarians and principals all over the country. The more I think about it, the more I realize that mine is the far easier job.