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Notes -
Thanks for this! That sounds like something I could let the 12yo read to himself, or at least something that I could read to him and the 10yo.
I consider this to be a goal of fiction but not a tautology. One of my favorite books is "Citizen of the Galaxy", a book aimed at 10-12 year olds where one of the side characters is obviously (to adults) a brothel owner-operator but where the evidence to that effect would go over little kids' heads. I also have the greatest of respect for whoever wrote the line "If I had a black light, this place would look like a Jackson Pollock painting" in "Guardians of the Galaxy". And even for less clever writers, "there's a scene change and everybody who should know what happened off-screen can probably figure it out" often isn't too hard to set up.
But my kids all started reading at age 2 or 3, and started reading long-form stuff like Harry Potter at 5 or 6, and precocious intellect runs in my family in a way that precocious maturity ... does not. My kids are much more mature than I was at their ages, but even though they'd survive darker/grosser/etc. well enough, they still have their preferences. They all thought HPMOR was good enough to be worth its most upsetting scene, but they clearly thought there was a scale there with weight on both sides.
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