rspberries replied to your post “i’m diving deep into the book/library side of tumblr for my class and...”
tbh the raven cycle seems exactly like the kind of thing a middle schooler would love, foul mouthed or not. i loved it when i first read it at 16 but i’m sure it wouldn’t have been too advanced for me or most kids at 12 or 13
that’s the sticky wicket of middle-grade librarianship!
Usually, readers of all ages do an excellent job of finding books that they like and passing over books that don’t meet their individual interests. Kids in particular are much better at self-selecting than many adults realize! The real issue with middle-grade collection development is exactly that though: middle schoolers are often seen as just young enough to still need protecting, and it’s likely that the adults in their lives consider most YA “inappropriate.”
A middle schooler with a library card might be able to circumvent this by hitting up their public library solo, but in a school library you sometimes have to be more selective (although that’s mostly because of spacial and financial constraints, and hopefully not bc of parents). At the particular preK-8th school I work at, we have lots of YA available for the middle schoolers, and 4th-6th graders are told they can read books with the YA stickers on them as long as they have permission from their parents.
I don’t actually think Ronan’s linguistic talents are actually the only reason why we have Stief’s Shiver Trilogy but not TRC, or even the primary reason (given that we have other YA books in which characters swear a’plenty). I can’t actually compare the two since I haven’t read Shiver, but there’s a lot of heavy themes in TRC that could easily miss with a lot of younger readers -- but definitely not all of them!
And that’s the other tricky thing about middle-grade collections development: kids all grow at different rates! You probably would have been totally chill with TRC as a middle schooler, but based on what I remember of my middle school self I probably would have been a little freaked out and overwhelmed by the content. Heck, I didn’t even like Tamora Pierce’s The Will of the Empress when it came out, even though I was dedicated to The Circle of Magic series, because the characters were older and they were dealing with more adult themes that I hadn’t had to think about yet as a 12-year-old. Then I finally came back to it at 20 and loved it!
Some tweens love books aimed at older teens, and some tweens need to actually be the target age range (or older) before they can get into those books. Just the quirks of people!