Grace Heriegel

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For those who don’t know me in real life, I have started working at Blackwell’s bookstores which I am so excited about!! In the transition from Waterstone’s to Blackwell’s, I now work in a slightly different location of a shopping centre. As weekends and malls can only mean one thing, there are a lot of teenagers that we serve in the store.

Something I think isn’t spoken about enough is the lack of restriction for ‘spicy books’. For those of you who don’t know, romance books are considered to have a ‘spice level’ when they contain explicit, detailed or frequent sexual content (think Fifty Shades of Grey…). These books have done an absolute wonder on BookTok, covering novels from the newly successful Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid (also known as the Game Changer series) to Ana Huang’s Twisted novels.

These novels have done extraordinarily well in the past few years, with many other novels being produced by these authors, fellow writers taking on this ‘sexy’ challenge and even series being produced into popular TV shows.

So now you know me, and what these ‘spicy books’ are, I introduce the question of this blog post which is: should these be age-restricted? Currently, no books (at least that I am aware of) have age restrictions on them to limit purchase. This means that sexual content, violence and other sensitive topics are open to anyone who has £10.99 to spend. Not only are children exposing themselves to topics that are definitely too old for them, but sometimes parents are buying these books as presents without knowing the content themselves.

A direct example of where I believe this should be enforced, is looking at George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice series vs the HBO Game of Thrones show. Whilst you are free to buy and read the books at any age (something I am currently reading!), most of the seasons of the show are 18+ and require ID for purchase. I truly believe this makes no sense, as both contain nearly the same material only in different formats.

Especially with the rise in explicit content in books, and the current absurd state of the world we are surrounded by causing havoc to our young people, I think this is a conversation bookshops and publishing houses alike need to be introducing. You can restrict a child’s viewing on the internet, why not the topics in novels?? It’s not arguable that reading needs to be accessible, but with the sheer amount of good quality and age suitable literature out there we need to do the best we can to protect our youth.