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As a kid, I liked the "traumatic" stuff. The world isn't all sunshine and roses and a lot of the scary elements are there to instill kids with an awareness of danger so they don't become a victim of something horrible. Most of us today live in a world where we don't get eaten by wolves and kidnapped and sold into slavery anymore, but our society is fragile. All it takes is a few bad economic disasters, war, or a famine and things get rough pretty quickly. And right now there are kids enduring those realities.
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Roald Dahl would agree with you. Fiction is the perfect place to explore complex emotions around the unsavoury parts of life, in a safe manner where the reader is in control.
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