Tweet

| Reader Comments

In the YA world, challenges to books aren’t terribly rare; the ALA reports hundreds of such formal complaints each year. While this happens frequently enough with books that depict sex or witchcraft, it’s less common to have concerns raised about theology.

That’s precisely the case with The Book of Knowledge (Blooming Tree/CBAY, Oct.), the second in David Michael Slater’s series of six YA novels that chronicle the adventures of 13-year-old twins. In the first installment, The Book of Nonsense (2008), the twins uncover secrets about their own family history while also getting hints of a larger cosmic drama, learning about a secret language that God may have used to create the world. In The Book of Knowledge, they follow clues to the original Garden of Eden and discover that the record of primordial events recorded in Genesis may not tell the whole story.

That got a response—early blog comments and some angry voices—that’s been snowballing. Following a profile that ran in Slater’s hometown paper, the Beaverton(Ore.) Valley Times, last month, other journalists jumped on the bandwagon, starting with the Oregonian and spreading to the Washington Post online. Slater’s publisher, Blooming Tree Press in Texas, has also fielded interest from News Hour with Jim Lehrer, the New York Times, and the Jewish national publication The Forward.

That’s a lot of attention for a series whose initial three-book contract only paid $1,000 per novel. A high school writing teacher, Slater is hardly an overnight success, having published 16 picture books with various houses and one adult novel, Selfless, with Absey & Company in March of this year. He was “both depressed and elated” about the controversy. “It’s depressing that the attention is because people are upset, but fantastic that people might actually know about my books and read them,” he said.

As for religion, he insisted he has no axe to grind. His family is active in Portland’s Jewish community, and he “never set out to write a book that changed the Bible or would rewrite Genesis. All of that came in the writing process.” Still, future books in the series will continue to explore biblical themes, and the twins “will continue to learn things that contradict the biblical stories”—including aspects of the New Testament. “And my novels will continue to be fiction,” Slater said firmly.

The third book in the series, The Book of Maps, will release in October 2010.

Also on PW

PW Picks for May 21, 2012 more...

PW's Best Books of 2011

Get ready for BEA with PW!