For most of its run, Keepers of the Lost Cities has been a lightweight but generally “safe” book – there’s no language, minimal violence, no sex (though quite a lot of flirting), and, up until the latest book, no agenda. But, on that last point, things changed with book 9.5, Unravelled. Author Shannon Messenger has decided that her readers need to know that homosexuality is “really cool.”
I’ve read about 9 of the, to this point, 11 Keepers of the Lost Cities (KOTLC) books, including this latest one, but have to admit to not being the biggest fan. I’ve been reading them because my girls were reading them.
“Candy” books are one thing, “candy” series another
I don’t like KOTLC because I’m not wild about the premise: a lonely girl with no friends discovers she is super special. She’s an elf, hidden in the human world because she’s actually the most powerful, most important person (human or elf) in the world. She gets rescued by an astonishingly handsome guy, taken to a world of incredible wealth where she’s famous, and three handsome guys are competing for her attention.
That is not the best message for young girls, all of whom will go through teenage struggles with popularity and loneliness. This updated version of the “Prince Charming” message – that something or someone will arrive to put you on the pedestal you’ve always deserved to be on – is unhelpful.
Still, silly isn’t all that big a deal in small doses – some kinds of silly can be absolutely wonderful in measured doses – so my main problem with these books is just how many of them there are and how much time will be spent in this fantasy. They average over 700 pages each, with 11 books in the series so far. A silly picture book or a less-than-fantastic standalone novel is like eating some candy. Having a chocolate bar now and again is no biggie… but if your main meal for days and even weeks is just candy? That’s something else. What we have here is more than 7,000 pages of silliness (so far), so that deserves some care and attention.
To mitigate things, I made a deal with my girls to “supplement their diet.” They had to read a book or two of my choosing – something that would be a bit meatier (though still enjoyable) – before they could move on to the next in the KOTLC series. Oh, and they had to give me a verbal book report for the latest KOTLC they’d just read. We all know how much kids love giving book reviews, but I wasn’t trying to make this punitive. I’d been reading the books, too, and I wanted to see if they were astute enough to see through the silliness. Why’d I even let them read it? I’d have preferred they skip the series altogether, but I also wanted to teach them how to treat books appropriately. I didn’t want to make too big of something that wasn’t big. This series was candy, not poison.
Subtle and delayed
But then came book 9.5. LOTLC has a confusing system of numbering, with 9 “main” novels, and then an 8.5 and a 9.5 that offer new perspectives on the story that’s already been told to this point. In 9.5 we get to see things from the perspective of a handsome rogue of an elf, Keefe, who is hiding in the human world, which is where he runs into homosexuality.
It’s only a few pages in another tome. On pages 137-141, a helpful jogger shares a trick he uses to stay mentally focused. And he also shares with Keefe that he has a “husband.” Then, on pages 259-262, Keefe converses with a spunky waitress who makes mention of her “wife.” Each time, it’s just the one mention, and it might even slip past some readers unnoticed. But while Messenger seems to be trying to be subtle about it, she didn’t want to be too subtle. So, on page 265, Keefe and his fellow elf Alvar talk about how humans have a variety of couples, including waitresses who have wives and men who have husbands. Alvar thinks, “It’s really cool,” and Keefe agrees, “it is.”
That’s it. Just a half dozen pages. But in a kids’ series. And we also don’t know – and we have no reason to trust – where the author is going to take our kids in the series’ last, yet to have been published, title.
We live in a world in which increasing numbers of people “identify” with these sins, so parents shouldn’t be surprised when gay and trans characters pop up in today’s books. On my desktop, I have a booklet from Scholastic, purportedly the world’s largest publisher of children’s books for K-12, called Read with Pride. It featured a 100+ “LGBTQIA+” book list of titles they are promoting to schools, librarians, and teachers. They’ve been pushing this booklist since at least 2017, and I’ve noticed a real increase in LGBT content in anything published since 2020. It’s like there is a box that needs to be checked. And everyone is checking it. So this agenda is everywhere.
But it wasn’t in KOTLC for the first ten books. This is another bait and switch like happened with the Wings of Fire series. The author pulled readers and parents in with an agenda-free opener, but once kids were hooked, Messenger could introduce her LGBT plug. If it’d started that way, conservative kids and parents would have steered clear, but with it happening so late in the series, even Christian kids will want to keep reading to find out how it all ends.
Godless as a given?
There’s one more concern with Shannon Messenger’s books, and with any secular series that’ll have our kids living in it for days and weeks at a time. That’d include Harry Potter and The Mysterious Benedict Society‘s thousands of pages, and even something like the original 60+ title Hardy Boys series.
R.C. Sproul once said of the public education system:
“To teach children about life and the world in which they live without reference to God is to make a statement about God. It screams a statement. The message is either that there is no God or that God is irrelevant. Either way, the message is the same.”
His point is every bit as true for stories. If all our kids are reading are secular books, a statement is being made. Whether they recognize it or not, they are being taught “either that there is no God or that God is irrelevant.” While we don’t know yet whether Messenger is going to finish her series by upping the LGBT content, or by backing off it, we do know already that she’s spent 7,000+ pages teaching our kids that God isn’t.
So, what’s a good supplement to all this candy? Some solid Christian fiction and biographies.
