YA Twitter, a social-media community dedicated to young-adult fiction, is a frequently toxic place that aggressively surveils both its members and the books they write for violations of ever-shifting social-justice rules. Last month it descended on A Place for Wolves, the young-adult author Kosoko Jackson’s debut novel. The controversy? People who hadn’t read the book took issue with the fact that Jackson, who is black and gay, wrote an adventure-romance centered on two foreign teenagers trying to escape Kosovo as war breaks out there, and that the villain was an ethnic Albanian Muslim.
Jackson himself had previously done work as a sensitivity reader and even participated rather gleefully in past YA Twitter pile-ons. But after becoming the center of his own controversy, he agreed to unpublish his book just a month or so before it was scheduled to be released.
Jesse Singal recently received a copy of the canceled A Place for Wolves. Read his review in his latest for Reason.
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