Reasons I would not want my children reading Empress Theresa

Norman Boutin has made repeated claims that his book is not only appropriate for children but should be taught as part of the language art curriculum. Over the years he claimed to have submitted excerpts of his work to multiple teachers and department heads. As of now it can be assumed that none of them have added it to the recommended reading list for their students as Norman has repeatedly dodged inquiries about the success of his efforts.

There are many reasons why children should not read *Empress Theresa.*

* **Theresa is a narcissist.** Everything, literally everything, is about her. She has no humility, no sense of proportion, no understanding that other people can have valid points of view that do not coincide with hers.
* **Theresa is a Mary Sue.** In normal fiction, the main character learns, through the conflict in the narrative, to be a better person. In Mary Sue fiction, everybody else learns just how awesome the Mary Sue is, and they should listen to her and obey her.
* **Theresa is shallow and vain.** The fact that she judges people by their jobs or their social status, and seemingly by nothing else, is a bad start. Her obsession with how amazingly attractive she is, and using her beauty to punish an ex-boyfriend for not bending to her will, continue the trend, and it never ceases.
* **Theresa has no goals of her own.** Boutin tries to handwave some for her, wanting to be a schoolteacher in the beginning. But apart from that, and marrying the non-character of Steve Hartley, basically everything in the book is a result of Boutin's vaunted "impossible problems". That's another way of saying he didn't have a conflict to build a plot around, so he had to invent artificial problems to give his protagonist. The reason there was no conflict was because Theresa has no goals, no aims, and thus nothing to bring her into conflict in any kind of organic way.
* **The writing is terrible**. Not only should no child have to suffer reading Boutin's stilted prose or terrible punctuation, but they should definitely not model their own writing on anything Boutin has written.
* **The writing and narrative flow do not model the way normal, healthy minds think.** One reason younger people read books is to gain understanding of how the world works, and especially of how other people think and process the world around them. Consider the passage where Theresa and Jan Struthers discuss Theresa's rental of *2001: A Space Odyssey* and how it lead her to name her alien entity HAL. Not only is the conversation choppy and difficult to follow as a conversation, but the ostensible point of it — justifying Theresa's naming of HAL — makes no sense as written. And that is only the first of many, many incomprehensible trains of thought throughout the story.

The book has little chance of finding a place in any classroom. From the numerous punctuation mistakes, poor characterization, and nonexistent world building there is little that students could take away from 'Empress Theresa.'

Even as casual reading material the chances of this succeeding in either the children or YA genre is about zero. For younger children the book is far too long and rambling. It also contains references that they would have no knowledge or interest in such as "Victoria" a television show about the English Queen of the same name.

"Empress Theresa" would also flop in the YA market. The very thing that Norman takes so much pride in, Theresa's nearly perfect life, is the exact thing that teens will take issue with. Theresa has no problems. She will be unrelatable to most of the female audience who often struggle with body and esteem issues while male audiences will most likely put the book down for the long sections of naval gazing that interrupts action scenes.