Anne Fine, the United Kingdom’s official ”children’s laureate” and the author of the bestselling Mrs Doubtfire, has called for the new book for teenagers by Melvin Burgess to be pulped before it hits the shops.Doing It, Burgess’s novel of adolescent discovery aimed at teenage boys, features a teacher having oral sex with a pupil, as well as other descriptions of sex and boys’ discussions of sex. They bet on having sex with a filthy homeless person — ”’Can I shag her from behind?’ ‘No, from the front. With the lights on. Snogging and everything. And you have to do oral sex on her too … until she comes.””’I should,” writes Fine, ”… spare you the counting of the number of fingers a boy managed to fit up inside his girl, a lad’s heavy petting before coming back to ‘make us all sniff his fingers to show he’d been there’.” Fine’s demand for the book’s destruction is unprecedented in recent years, and points to the schism in children’s writing between iconoclasts like Burgess and those such as Fine and JK Rowling who are more mindful of traditional restraints. Fine lacerates Burgess — whose last book, Lady, about a 17-year-old girl who, after having sex with 10 boys, is turned into a liberated ”sniffy, licky, shaggy” dog — and his publishers for ”peddling this grubby book, which demeans young women and young men”. ”No girl or young woman should ever have to read these vile musings about themselves,” writes Fine. ”The publishers may claim they are the real thoughts of young men. But would they be pushing the ignorant views of four racists, or four anti-Semites, on the grounds these foul deluded people really think this way?” Burgess — dubbed the writer ”your parents don’t want you to read” — has been controversial since he won the Carnegie Medal in 1997 for Junk, a tale of two 14-year-old heroin addicts.Burgess said that trying to write a book about boy-girl relationships that boys would read was risky. ”Male sexuality is much less PC — it’s visual, rude and far more easily separated from its emotional context. So Doing It had to be filthy, in places anyway.” Doing It is not published in the United Kingdom until May, but its publishers sent out proof copies to other children’s authors in the hope of garnering support. Burgess’s editor at Andersen Press said the book’s cover had ”clear warning of explicit content”. Children’s author Tim Bowler, another Carnegie medalist, defended it as ”an honest, irreverent … hilarious study of … awakening sexuality.” — Â