It wasn’t immediately obvious why people raged about the cleanliness ratings until I began to think more about it. There’s a difference between what administrators of YA Book Ratings intended, what ratings actually do, and how this impacts children, teenagers, and adults. And how it ties to banned books.
“The Hole in the System” is based on three things. It’s about a plague of holes. It’s about systems. And it’s about the shopping cart theory, the viral theory that you can determine whether a person is a good or bad member of society depending on whether they return their shopping carts. A post about what inspired me to write it.