Warning: Disturbing Content
At The California Review, we are sympathetic to the great tradition of tolerance we have inherited from men like Locke and Jefferson. This is especially true if your religion is the authoritarian cult that sexualizes and chemically castrates children known as Queer Theory. So, I exercised both my First Amendment rights and those of some pedophile authors who exploit the First Amendment and visited the Downtown Berkeley Public Library to explore our great Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
I checked out over 30 books from the ALA Most Challenged and Rainbow Round Table Stonewall Honors lists. I determined the picture books and graphic novels to be the groomiest and ranked those. There is no requirement for, nor or any standardized definition of, age classification in publishing. It is set by each publisher but is influenced heavily by the ALA. When a publisher or author did not explicitly specify this metric, I used Amazon’s. It is also important to note that though this article may have a lightly provocative tone and started in jest, it did not end that way. There was, it turns out, absolutely nothing fun or funny about child predation and child sexual abuse. So, whir up those wood chippers. From least to most groomy, here is our 2025 Groomer Books Tier List.
7) Flamer, by Mike Curato (2020), Ages 12+
Aiden is a teenager who is innately homosexual. He is from a Catholic family, and the environmental rejection to his inapposite impulses causes him a great deal of guilt and emotional distress, which, by the end of the book’s 364 pages, brings him to the point of self-harm. There are Catholic themes e.g. Aiden dreams of being sacrificed by his peers. He ultimately chooses life despite his suffering and the book encourages its readers to do the same. It has a very creative use of color, reminiscent of psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched With Fire. The book suggests there is an innate basis for homosexuality, which means it is not Queer Theory activism. Whether or not it is appropriate for 12-year-olds is up to you.
6) It’s Perfectly Normal, by Robie H Harris and Michael Emberley (1994), Ages 10+
It’s Perfectly Normal is the original-sex education book from the 1990s. It’s unclear from our 2021 edition what was originally politically correct from 1994 and what has been updated and injected with intersectional activism. Though there are plenty of mildly graphic illustrations in its 116 pages and graphic parts have the politically correct disabled, multicultural and fat illustrations, none are sexualized and there are no troons and no Queer Theory. Despite the completely unnecessary and unsettling naked people in wheelchairs etc. everyone appears to be one of two genders.
5) Sparkle Boy, by Lesléa Newman and Maria Mola (2017), Ages 3+
Sparkle Boy is a children’s picture book about an outlier little boy of about four years old (“Sparkle Boy”) who does not innately want blocks, animal puzzles, or toy dump trucks but rather the skirts, painted nails and jewelry that his older sister wears. At first his older sister doesn’t like his imitation of her but when the older boys chastise him at the library, she has his back. It’s unclear whether this is just sibling dynamics or about Sparkle Boy’s sexuality but either way there is nothing graphic or erotic and it doesn’t sexualize children. However, this lack of clarity does open up a possibility of extrinsic motives.
4) The Bride Was a Boy, by Chii “Bride-chan” (2016), Ages 13+
The Bride Was a Boy is a Japanese manga “comic essay” based on the true story of Bride-chan. He is troubled and goes to Thailand for his lady-boy surgery, finds love and marriage and provides instructions for the youth along the way to learn from her trials. At the end of the 150 pages, Husband-kun and Bride-chan state that they hope that they “may live together peacefully to old age”. I am actually kind of rooting for Bride-chan, just as long as he/she stays in Japan and is not allowed to enter the USA under any circumstances.
3) Gender Queer, by Maia Kobabe (2022), Ages 12+
The book is an autobiography of a butch lesbian who, not having much else, defines herself primarily through her “queer” sexual identity. Its 256 pages of colorful illustrations are extremely inane and boring until she draws a sequence in which she is sucking a strap-on worn by another woman she met on Tinder.
2) Not He or She, I’m Me, by AM Wild and Kah Yangni (2023), Ages 5+
The main character of Not He or She… is an androgynous POC child around five-years-old. The book has a very authoritarian tone, dictating that your kindergartener repeats an affirmation like “not he or she” / “I am them” on nearly every page.
Warning: Disturbing Images
1) Let’s Talk About It, by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan (2021), All ages
Let’s Talk About It specifies on the title page that it is for all ages. It is the authors' pedophilic child sexual abuse fantasy. It is intended to be written from the perspective of a sexualized teenager. However, all of the teenagers in the book are being taught by middle-aged people and all of the graphic sexual illustrations, of which there are hundreds in its 233 pages, are all of middle-aged people. The detailed sexual illustrations are as explicit as possible and are all of naked sexualized overweight, POC, disabled or midgets with details of their mismatched sexual organs, orifices, and missing and prosthetic transhumanist limbs. It has detailed explicit illustrations and detailed explicit instructions for children young enough to comprehend a cartoon illustration on how to find and see pornography, how to find people with whom to have sex using a phone, and how to participate in and perform sex kinks. There is an unintentionally ironic chapter on how to identify “abusive” people. I was morally incapable of returning this book to the library. It went in a dumpster. Please, let’s not talk about it again.
"Lets Talk About It" 2021
Luke 17:2
