Category Archives: Banned Books

Banned Books 101: Teaching Toddlers, Preschoolers, and Early Elementary Grades about the Right to Read

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Back in the trenches this week reviewing some recent picture books introducing younger readers to the concept of censorship.  Liberal values and a clever concept will get the project off and running, but good intentions may not be enough to avoid the potholes, such as explaining why it can happen, how it can affect them, and what is at stake.

All great topics for a board book modeled on the Baby Lit series.  “In this colorful celebration of groundbreaking books that have appeared on “banned” book lists, little readers get a glimpse into the books’ important themes,” gurgles the blurb.  In Baby’s First Book of Banned Books, the little rebel in the making should be engaged with the six- to seven- word themes and illustrations by Laura Korzon. “ I have gifts that are special” sums up Lois Lowry’s chapter book The Giver (1993) versus “My friends can help when I’m sad or scared” for YA novel Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wall Flower  (1999).  Compare with “We’re not so different you and me” for Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner (2003);  and “I am beautiful” for Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970).  The glossary provides parents with scripts with talking points so that they can deftly avoid in dialogue with their preliterate children the subjects that got the books banned in the first place such as rape, heavy recreational drug use, oppression and ostracization of minorities, trauma, and mental illness.  Tone deaf?  Cynical?

In 2018, Raj Haldar, aka Philadelphia rapper Lushlife, hit the jackpot as the coauthor of  P is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Ever, showing why it’s easier to learn to read than spell in English.  With 26 letters, 45 sounds and over 250 ways to put them together, there are too many choices and too many rules.   An exasperating subject that lends itself to humor, but is the same true for book banning?

Haldar and illustrator Julia Patton in This Book is Banned (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks eXplore, 2023) to fool around with a silly narrator and cook up squirrelly reasons for chopping things out of a book.  The cover, endpapers, and title page warn the reader to keep it closed. The narrator, confronted with the disobedient reader says go ahead, turn the page and see how any subject can be cancelled—giraffes, dinosaurs, avocados and beds without monsters underneath.  No can have the story of the Big Bad Wolf because somebody–not  the reader– was scared and so he was changed into a sweetie pie.  The last page announces that “we banned everything and there’s no ending left to read.”  The way Haldar and Patton break the fourth wall makes for a couple fun read alouds,  but it won’t be much of a resource if you have to explain why book banners are turning up the pressure on the school librarian.  Giraffes and avocados aren’t likely to be on the school board’s agenda.

In The Great Banned-Books Bake Sale, Aya Khalil tries to make a book banning in an elementary school library real for children that age.  The protagonist is Kanzi, the Egyptian immigrant girl in Khalil’s first book The Arabic Quilt (2020). Kanzi and her class go  to the library where they are told the diverse books have been removed on the order of the school board over the objection of the school librarian who acquired them for the boys and girls.  The children don’t understand what could possibly be wrong with the beautiful books they like for showing everyone “people of many identities, backgrounds, and walks of life.”  The principal and librarian urge them to fight for their right to read and the children hit on the idea to hold a bake sale of goodies mentioned in banned books within a few days.  The proceeds will go towards the purchase of replacement copies of books that about families like theirs.  When the sweets are all sold, the TV cameras arrive in time to film the peaceful demonstration urging the reversal of the ban and Kanzi finding the courage to read aloud her poem “Books are for everyone.  Am I not important?  Am I invisible?”   The school board backs down a week later and the diverse books are reinstated in their cases.

An Arab Muslim American mother, Khalil strongly advocates that black, brown, Asian, Native American, and immigrant (but not LGBTQUIA) children have access to “affirming, inclusive books” in this optimistic story where the characters agree wholeheartedly on what is right (and puff Khalil’s Arabic Quilt in several places).  Without the opposition being on stage to voice alternative values, the nature of social conflict and resolution has been simplified to the act of standing up for a set of beliefs without having to discuss and negotiate with those with a different viewpoint. Khalil and her illustrator Anait Semirdzhyan chose in The Great Banned-Books Bake Sale to light the spark of democratic participation by showing the triumph of authority on the first try, underscoring why 32-page picture books may not be the best vehicles for explanations of political processes.

There is nothing sunny or optimistic about the treatment of censorship in Banned Book by Jonah Winter, a noted author of non-fiction picture books.    Few of the Amazon reviewers disliked the book and gave the impression that they thought it was relevant and important because of the subject.  Winter’s text is redacted with words, phrases, and sentences blacked out with a reason for obliterating them to protect the reader from dangerous content. Almost everyone with a comment about the graphic design seemed to agree that as an explanation of the process of censorship, it was better suited for older children, who still would have difficult questions for an adult.

The blacking out creates intriguing patterns on the page without interrupting the flow of meaning because no text has actually been excised, as is quite clear on the last two pages.  In spite of the black lozenges marching across line after line, the message is unequivocal: “claim that they only want to protect children when what they really want is power over everyone, because they don’t believe other people have the right to think for themselves.  What had been a book was not just garbage decomposing, turning into dirt.”   Would the same exercise driven the same point home more forcefully to young readers if the text had been a familiar fairy tale like “Cinderella” or “Red Riding Hood” and they could puzzle out the missing bits of text and respond to their absence?

Illustrator Gary Kelley’s grainy pictures are dominated by shades of blue-gray, slate blue, and grayish lavender, with occasional highlights of tans and pale oranges communicate the idea that the battle has already been lost in the classroom and school library.  On the first page, a boy furtively looks into a book, as if he expects to be caught and a few pages later is a staring eye peering at a page through a magnifying glass looking for objectionable material.   Children sit mute in class, books open, their hands raised to answer a question to which there is only one answer. Hot red appears only in the two illustrations of the book banners and the devils on the cover.  The association of  the book banners with red sends mixed signals,  its contemporary associations with MAGA clashing with older left-wing ones such as Socialism and Communism.  Of this dystopian picture book, the one Amazon reviewer to give the book one star said, “A bit too stylized and dark for me. As for the text—I’m all for guiding kids to appropriate books and helping them process the difficult ones, but this book (as much as I was able to stomach) came across as bitter, didactic, and self-righteous.”

No denying how wonderful it is that Haldar, Khalil, and Winter all acknowledge librarians in their picture books for standing up for children’s right to read in the face of challenges by administrators, parents, and outside organizations, even if a tired old stereotype is perpetuated… From the perspective of a professional with the luxury of buying books capturing the contemporary moment for the future, it is hard to gauge if they can be effective teaching tools with the support of a thoughtful adult or if their presence on the shelves will be more successful in pouring oil on the fire in the struggle for control over curriculum and supporting resources.

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk about Banned YA Books

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When my mother hinted that the books in the children’s section were too easy for me, it was time to find something in the adult section of the Manhattan Beach Public Library.  The authors’ names on the spines were unfamiliar, but “Wodehouse” on a top shelf looked interesting and I pulled down one of the misadventures of Bertie Wooster, complete with gaspers, cocktails, and morning-after cures.  I was allowed to check it out without incident. The next time I presented a book from the adult section to the checkout desk, Mrs. Brown was the supervisor and refused to let me have it until she cleared it with my mother, who coolly confirmed I had her permission. Mrs. Brown did not approve.  Now their  one-on-one confrontation over my reading sounds so quaint.

Mrs. Brown never had to implement a policy like the one now enforced at the Hamilton East Public Library in Indianapolis, where sexually explicit YA books parents find objectionable are relocated in the adult section.   In last weekend’s Wall Street Journal,  Daniel Lee looked at this “culture-war skirmish” in connection with the beloved Indianapolis writer John Green.  His acclaimed YA novels  Looking for Alaska and The Fault Is in Our Stars have been targeted for depicting teenagers struggling with class conflict, dysfunctional families, terminal illness and chronic depression, who also chain-smoke, experiment with sex, binge-drink and drive.  Green denounced  the move as “political theater of the lowest and most embarrassing order.”

Lee weighed in by comparing Green’s work with Penrod, the classic novel of Hoosier boyhood by Booth Tarkington.   Lee suggested that Penrod’s existence at the turn of the twentieth century was unmarked by any trauma more devastating than surviving cotillions.  “He knew what bathroom to use, quips Lee, before continuing with:

Yes, some young people today are in terrible situations.  But it seems profoundly pessimistic—and ideologically loaded—to think most kids don’t live lives much like Penrod’s and worse, that they lack parents who are eager and competent to help when trouble comes.

Lee’s glib suggestions that yesterday’s classics still reflect the realities of young people’s lives did readers a disservice.  Well, yes, the characters in Penrod didn’t hook up, enjoy recreational chemicals in excess, or experience gender dysporia so the novel looks more wholesome.  On the other hand, in the early 1900s a white middle-class eleven-year-old boy left unsupervised to an extent unimaginable today could get in serious trouble without much difficulty.   He has the freedom to act on ideas that make his mother worry if he is headed for the  penitentiary.   Certain families forbid their sons to associate with him. Tongues wag at the Schofields’ inability to control him.  Some of his peers take vicarious pleasure in his antics, like talking back to the teacher and managing to elude punishment temporarily with the claim he was exhausted from comforting his distraught aunt, who has taken refuge from her drunken, abusive husband with the Schofield–a tall tale inspired by the silent film he watched instead of doing to Sunday school.

The cotillion episode, which Lee considered anodyne, is a typical episode showing Penrod acting on impulse for purely selfish reasons.  The day of the cotillion he discovers a basket of expired medicines, dentifrices, hair oil, condiments gone off, etc. in the stable put out for the trash.  After he and his friend Sam set up a drug store to fill prescriptions, Sam mixes up some “small pox medicine” using the contents of the basket and part of a bottle of licorice water to make it look palatable.  Tester dog Duke can’t keep it down and the boys wish it were possible to administer a dose to Professor Bartlett, so the cotillion would be cancelled.  Instead their frenemy Maurice Levy saunters by.  Penrod decides on a desperate measure to take out Maurice, so he can squire the adored Marjorie Jones and hand off his partner Baby Rennsdale to Sam, whose fair lady has had to send regrets.  Maurice is invited to drink as much licorice water as he can in one pull and the bottle of small pox medicine is substituted for the real one.   Maurice swallows it all, has a smoke, and heads home without exhibiting any ill effects to change for cotillion.

If Penrod’s reputation was affected by his friendship with the Black brothers, Herman and Verman, who live in the nearby alley, Tarkington didn’t come out and say so.  What strikes us now are the ambiguities of the power dynamics between the white boy and two “darkies.”  Verman suffers from ankyloglossia and his words have to be translated by his older brother Herman.  Herman is missing a forefinger, because his little brother chopped it off with an axe when told to as a joke. The boys’ father is in jail term for stabbing a man with a pitchfork.  Penrod finds  Herman and Verman so fascinating that he immediately proposes to his best friend Sam they could be the star attractions of a show, to which admission will be charged.

Equally troubling  is the Rupe Collins episode.  An older white boy from the wrong side of town comes around to play, which means he bullies and tortures Penrod and Sam.  Verman whacks Rupe with a board to make him stop and gets called the N-word.  Herman tells Rupe to lay off his brothers and his friends, setting off a terrific fight, in which the rules of fair play are suspended, while Penrod and Sam watch on the sidelines. Verman opens hostilities by striking Rupe with a rake because in “his simple, direct, African way, he wished to kill his enemy…and to kill him as soon as possible.”  The brawl comes to an end when Herman grabs a scythe and threatens to cut out Rupe’s gizzard and eat it.  It was probably trash talk, but Penrod and Sam are too shaken by the brothers’ “unctuous merriment” after their victory to say thank you.

Daniel Lee’s pronouncement that Tarkington’s Penrod is a book written back in the good old days when children were still children sounds as if he relied on a Wikipedia plot summary instead of reading it.  Classic books should have a place alongside contemporary problem YA novels, but let’s not kid ourselves that they are a retreat into nostalgia.  Growing up I reread Penrod multiple times and not because I had been fooled into thinking it was a wholesome read.  My mother assumed me capable to realizing that emulating the boys (or girly girly Marjorie) would be ridiculous because Tarkington’s Indiana was a different time and place.  Looking at Penrod again made me wonder if Tarkington was criticized in his day for crossing a line for including the relationship between the white and black boys…

George M. Johnson’s manifesto-memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue is notorious as the author’s account of his search for a meaningful, fulfilled life as a gay man and it includes his coming of age sexually.   What the book’s critics and would-be–censors neglect to say (probably because they haven’t read it), is that it’s also a warm, loving tribute to the Black family that had his back while he was growing up painfully conscious of being different and unsure where he belonged.  The book is worth reading just for the portrait of his Nana, with whom he was very close, or his memories of jumping Double Dutch with the girls, to mention just two passages.  Don’t damn a book without giving the author a chance and don’t praise it without a detailed sense of how the strengths and weaknesses may be intertwined.  Regardless of when a book was written, it is probably more complex than its reputation.