A YA author publicly bragged on social media that she designed her book’s cover art to fool parents into thinking it was an innocent friendship story while signaling its LGBTQ theme to children.
Rebecca Bendheim, a middle school teacher and author of “When You’re Brave Enough,” posted on Instagram that when Penguin Random House asked her what she wanted for the cover, she gave explicit instructions: “I said I wanted it to be gay enough for queer kids and teens to clock it, but for homophobic parents to just think it’s a friendship story.” The book is marketed for children ages 10 to 14.
“So I said, no holding hands, make my character look gay,” Bendheim wrote, detailing how she and the cover artist embedded coded visual cues, including flowers meant to represent a growing crush. In a follow-up video, she tested the cover on strangers and praised librarians who help children find “subtle queer books.”
The book was released by Dutton Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Bendheim’s approach isn’t isolated. A Good Morning America YA Book Club selection titled “Sibylline,” by author Melissa de la Cruz, has drawn widespread criticism for containing graphic sex scenes, including a depiction of necrophilia, threesomes, and a non-consensual encounter. The novel is advertised as a YA “dark academia romantasy” aimed at middle and high school students. No content warnings appear anywhere on the book.
Readers flooded Amazon and Goodreads with one-star reviews after publication in February.
“The audience is children and there are graphic descriptions of sexual acts between characters,” one reviewer wrote.
Andrew Karre, executive editor at Dutton Books for Young Readers, the same Penguin Random House imprint behind Bendheim’s book, defended the broader practice in an interview with PEN America in November 2025. “Sex. Whether actually having it or imagining having it, sex is inextricable from 13- to 19-year-olds,” Karre said. He argued that removing sexual content would effectively make it “impossible to publish YA novels” as he understands them.
Karre further contended that exposing teenagers to sexual content in books is preferable to them finding it through pornography, describing that alternative as “ethically problematic.”
