I have been lucky enough to receive wonderful emails and messages from people who have read The Beautiful Between. I’m honored anytime someone has taken the time to read the book, and even more so when they then take the time to tell me what they thought about it – whatever their feelings on the novel might have been. A few months ago, however, I received a note that really threw me for a loop. A reader didn’t approve of some of the language used in the book, and wrote that this was not a book that she could, in good conscience, recommend teens read. She suggested that I was unaware that plenty of teens don’t talk like that, and that I might have used my book as an opportunity to show teens that they can communicate without any “bad” language. I was, at first, somewhat apologetic, and wrote her an email explaining that it was never my intention to offend anyone with the language in the book; that I had been trying to simply tell an honest story, and that while I understood that many...