Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex

A first for me - writing about a book that I chose not to finish. David & I had such high hopes for this book. I insisted we finish The Golden Compass before starting it, and David would ask "How many pages left NOW?!", wheedling and needling me to start this one. I kind of wish we had started it when it first arrived about a month ago: our anticipation and excitement increased with each delay, and now my heart is a little broken at the loss of the book I wanted to read.

Look at how exciting this blurb is: "Probing our child-rearing (I shudder at that word every time, so old-fashioned) for what it tells us about our culture, Amy Schalet's Not Under My Roof offers an unprecedented, intimate account of the different ways that girls and boys in [the United States and the Netherlands] negotiate sex, love, and growing up." Sounds great, let's get reading, right?! There aren't many (any?) topics that I am more interested in than parents, teens, and the culture of sex. I have very different ideas about teenagers and sex than my parents and David's parents do - I hoped this book could inform me how other Americans feel and maybe enlighten me as to whether the difference in opinion is based mostly on religion, politics, generation, or a combination.

Now I'll never know because this book is written so. academically. It is incredibly arduous to read. The sentences are long and complex, with lots of theses and not much substance. It's especially unfortunate that I attempted to read it aloud while I have a kid pressing down on my diaphragm - I often found myself gasping for breath two, even three times in the same sentence. Don't believe me? Try it for yourself:

"In the process of illuminating those frames, we gain insight into the workings of normalization as an active cultural process - which involves conceptualizing, controlling, and constituting both teenagers and parents: we will see that the three cultural frames construct adolescent sexuality as a nonproblematic, non-emotionally disruptive, and decidedly relationship-based phenomenon."

I mean, come on. Cut a pregnant lady some slack, Amy.

Ok, so we read the introduction and hated it. We thought, maybe the first chapter will have more case studies and those will propel the book forward and make it readable. Not so. Yes, it's interesting in theory to read why Dutch and American parents will or won't let their teenagers have sexy sleepovers. But even the excerpts from real parents were banal. After the third time we read a quote and thought "Why was that deemed important enough to include?", it was time to put this book back on the shelf. We just couldn't convince ourselves that it would get better.

As I write this, I'm still so sad that I'm not reading this book that I might renege and soldier on sans David. I really do think it will be a better book that way, though still not even close to the book I wanted to read. Reading it to myself will allow time for mining the especially academic passages for meaning and will give my poor lungs a well-deserved break. If it's still just so terrible as to not warrant my time, I'll skip to the conclusion and see if I can ferret out anything meaningful in there. And if even that fails, I already saw her references in the back - surely some of those books will be good.

Are you the kind of reader who abandons ship sometimes, or do you finish every book you start? When do you decide a book isn't worth your time?