At least they're reading...

Putting your children in the way of good books they can savour and explore is one of parenting's true satisfactions. Our children need books in their teen years more than any other time. Books break through loneliness, help the reader form moral choices and so on. But I don't think I'm ready for my 12-year-old to read about the joys of being a "bitch in heat".

Melvin Burgess's Lady: My Life as a Bitch is a beautiful book, beautifully written. It's an allegory of sexual liberation, said the intelligent 20-something who sold me the book. In many ways, I want to believe this. The book is spot on around the issues of female adolescent sexuality. It's sold in the same section in Eason's as children's writers Babette Cole, Roald Dahl and Maurice Sendak - but believe me, it's not for anybody under 18.

Burgess's heroine, 16-year-old Sandra Francy, says, "People think less of a girl if she sleeps around a bit, and of course I don't want people to think of me as a slut, or a bit of a bike. But I'll tell you this - I'm glad I did it. I'm happy I did it. I don't regret one second - even the bits that were horrible." This isn't sexual liberation. It's sexual nihilism.

Sandra is a middle child who was hurt by her parents' split. She's roaming the streets with her latest boyfriend, looking for a place to snog, when she is turned into a dog by an "alchie" named Terry. Terry discovered in infancy that whenever he gets angry, the subject of his anger is instantly transformed into a canine. His parents, step-parents, friends - everybody - were turned into dogs. This was inevitable because, as we all know, you cannot be in an intimate relationship with anyone without getting angry at them occasionally.

When she's turned into a "bitch" named Lady, Sandra discovers guilt-free sexual freedom. All her desires are met without consequence. "Fella and I ran round each other a few times, then he got behind me and was up, on and in. And - oh! Wow wow wow WOW!. . .Is that scent rabbit?" When, at the end of the book, she has the choice of re-engaging with her family or remaining a dog, she "jumps" for being a dog.

Can a teenage girl have sex without it being a no-strings-attached bitch-in-heat? Burgess implies that she can't. That's my problem.

Then there's the whole issue of whether teenagers should be reading about rampant sexual desire at all. It is as hard for us to think of them as being "horny" as it is for them to think of us in the same situation.

How much do they really know? How deep is their desire? It occurred to me, then, that if you really want to know your child, if you really want to know about their social, sexual and financial yearnings, you should go into Eason's and have a look at what they're reading. A whole series of books have warnings, "rated for teenagers only" - considering that 13-year-olds are considered teenagers, it's worrying.

One such popular book is Hard Cash: coins & banknotes, leading to freedom, potency, style, possession & sex, part of a series by Kate Cann. Another in her series is called Shacked Up.

In Hard Cash, the protagonist, Rich, leaves behind his poor circumstances at home and uses his art talent to become the teenage voice of "Slinger", an alcopop. After the media people have had their way with him and stolen all his ideas, he ends up as poor as when he started. Along the way he learns that the girl who wanted to have sex with him just because he had money isn't worth it after all.

Nothing wrong with that lesson, but along the way there's sex in a lift (shades of Fatal Attraction): "I squeeze her in tight against me. She keeps hold of the bars, and kind of writhes against me. I bring my face down to hers, and kiss her mouth, then her neck. Then I slide my hands round to the front, and she doesn't stop me. All right! I kiss her again, doing all the fancy things I can think of with my tongue, and I work my hands up under her jumper, and then and then. . .and then I hate to admit this, but I start to feel ridiculous. I begin to wish she'd - you know - interact. I begin to wish she'd let go of the sodding bars and put her arms round me and hug me or something. Hold me.

"God, what does she expect? Just what is expected of me here? Should I go for it, or what? And isn't she going to help?" Thinking he's in a cheesy soft-porn film, our protagonist starts to laugh.

The girl isn't impressed. And he leaves her, realising that the subject of his passion wasn't worth it.

Some girls are cheap, in other words.

I'm getting a theme here. Burgess: girls who admit to having desire are "bitches". Cann: some girls are only in it for the money. Do our children need to read this? Then there's the horror: The Blair Witch Files series - full of hear-stopping violence - is typical of the genre.

I read The Obsession by Cade Merrill. It begins: "Let me ask you something. How do you ever know what to believe? I'm talking about the major stuff. the kinds of things that make you wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night thinking, what if I've screwed up? How do you separate what you want to know from what you can know? Can you want answers so much that your desire for them clouds your judgment? How easy is it to convince yourself a lie is the truth?"

This is what it is like to be a teenager. A world full of demands and screwed-up messages, so confusing that you don't know what to believe. But when Cann gets into satanic forces, past lives and so on, it's apparent that ordinary teenage confusion is being exploited as a marketing niche. Filling the niche with ideas about evil and the occult is dangerous.

There is only one conclusion: publishers of teenage fiction don't care about what it's good for our children to read, they only want to publish what our teens will buy.

A lot of parents say, "who cares what it is, as long as they're reading." I say to parents: read it before they do. Take care.