Not in real life, not as a trust exercise, not as a metaphor. Protip: don't toss your kids under the bus for your own actions. NO WONDER YOUR KID DOUBTS YOUR DEVOTION TO HIM. Even though it was the father that prompted and executed the upsetting actions. His father, at one point in the story, uncharacteristically helps Peter, and when the mother complains, his father then BLAMES PETER FOR UPSETTING HIS MOTHER. They provide him with cryptic, flawed information and expectations, and when he, an eleven year old, acts towards those goals, he is punished. They are utterly incapable of seeing the good in ANYTHING Peter does, and give him completely conflicting, mixed messages of what is expected of him, leading to Peter basically having an 11 year old's crisis of 'how do I please these people, and in pleasing them, get them to show me that they love me?' His parents are either liars or simply acting - and raising him - in bad faith. Victim blaming the second: Peter's parents are one dimensional, emotionally stunted, horrible excuses for parents and for people. It's incredibly troubling to me that this Juvenile Fiction has such a clear message of victim blaming as a central plotpoint. Neither Peter's emotions nor actions caused these things. Peter is ELEVEN GODDAMN YEARS OLD, and is killed, in turn, by a speeding car, by a DIFFERENT speeding car, and then by a car that loses control, hops the curb, and RUNS HIM OVER ON A SIDEWALK. Every facet of this book is geared to establish that Peter is wrong, Peter's actions and feelings caused his demise, Peter is to blame for all the bad things in his life. Peter spends most of this book trying to convince his parents, and himself, that he is worthy of being loved.įirst and foremost: holy victim blaming, Batman.

It also turns out that he is adopted, and that his adoptive parents are now expecting a bio-baby. Rewind is the story of Peter, an 11 year old boy who is killed by a car crash, and is given the opportunity to return to a point in his life to try and alter his life such that he doesn't get hit. I usually love William Sleator, but when I read this last night, I was horrified, and not in the good way. And I cannot for a second imagine an actual eleven year old picking up on how deeply fucked up these messages are, only that they might identify with the protagonist's thought process - and in turn, possibly cause themselves harm by acting accordingly. This is JF fiction, not Hegel, and the messages this book is presenting to actual children are legitimately harmful to their sense of self. I'm not one for censorship, but if this book could be unwritten, I would consider that a public good.

Singularity sleator