Handselling a book whose reading experience would be materially diminished by spoilers can be a particularly difficult challenge for a bookseller if the book’s intrinsic strength is related to elements that would be inconsiderate to broach. For example you might ask why reading Sarah Everett’s The Probability of Everything brought up for me the topic of circumventing damaging spoilers, and all I could morally say was that it is an amazing book and you should read it yourself straightway and find out.
Sure, to promote the book one could just elide the dynamic surprise element or go big on description so as to say that its brilliant and novel use of an unreliable narrator is used as a lever to humanize the impacts of inhumanity with remarkable force. By tightly maintaining focus on its insightful and resilient young narrator the story extends from the personal to the cultural and communal with far-reaching effect. And so forth. One might feel more latitude if pitching the book to an adult who is purchasing it for a young reader, but it would still be wrong. Nonetheless, the susceptibility of The Probability of Everything to having its reading experience diminished by spoilage is a tricky but ultimately happy constraint. After all, having a book to share the power of whose impact on the reader would rival that of the earth’s on being struck by a giant asteroid is a rare and desirable responsibility.
The book also made me ask myself if there are other great children’s books which have a similarly fraught relationship with spoilers? Sure, there are many books with an important secret. You could certainly thoughtlessly spoil Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking trilogy, Marie Lu’s Warcross, or Melissa Albert’s Hazelwood, but it is easy to talk about and promote those books without doing so. A book like Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon is a toughie to be sure, but I can’t think of another book in which the spoiler is the hook quite as strikingly as it is in The Probability of Everything. What are the most spoiler sensitive books you’ve promoted?