A study by the Australian Catholic University is calling for a rating system to be applied to books in the young adult (YA) genre as many of the more popular novels have mature themes unsuitable to the 12 to 17-year-old audience.
Digital criminologist and child safeguarding expert Dr Emma Hussey, who works at ACU’s Institute of Child Protection Studies is urging parents to be more aware of what their children, and especially their daughters, are reading.
She said the books she looked into—Icebreaker, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and Once Upon a Broken Heart, among others—were chosen because they were all incredibly popular on “BookTok,” a subsection of social media platform TikTok where users read and recommend books to each other.
She said the kinds of books favoured by readers have domestic violence-adjacent behaviours and explicit sex scenes, which are romanticised and then popularised on social media.
Hussey said BookTok’s popularity may be partly attributed to the COVID pandemic, as reading is something a person can do by themselves in their home.
“When we consider the types of books at that are being pushed as recommendations, and some of them are genuine YA books, but others are these ‘romantasy’ or dark romance books that fall through the cracks,” she told The Catholic Weekly.
“Romantasy” is a BookTok subgenre whose name is a portmanteau of romance and fantasy.
This subgenre is characterised by having stories take place in fairytale worlds typically featuring intense romances and explicit sex scenes.
Romantasy is not new. Most vampire novels, for example Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles which was popular during the 90s, fits the blueprint—but it is more popular than ever with children, who are picking up books with disturbing contents.
Yet Hussey said BookTok novels quietly disclaim they are not for children, such as Icebreaker by UK author Hannah Grace, which has a small note on the back cover denoting it as 18+.
The problem, however, comes with covers of these books. Icebreaker has a pastel image of a man and a woman in an illustration style associated with children’s books, meaning parents may have no cause for alarm if they saw their child reading it.
She pointed to the incredibly popular series A Court of Thorns and Roses, as an example of the genre’s glamorisation of toxic relationship behaviours, as it features an unequal relationship between a teenage girl and a powerful older male feature.
She said it was giving YA readers a bad foundation as instead of reading about relationships based on mutual trust, love, and affection, girls are at risk of internalising these dangerous dynamics.
“I think that’s incredibly harmful for young women to internalise, and then see it laid out on the page and marketed or pushed towards our younger adults,” Hussey said.
Hussey said there was an opportunity for schools or trusted religious figures to use these books as bad examples.
“When a story shows control or jealousy is love, that’s an opportunity for a values-based conversation about what healthy and respectful relationships look like,” she said.
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