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Five Great Banned Books and How to Discuss Them With Your Kids
By Michael Giltz,
7 days ago
Here are five great banned books and how to discuss them with your kids . Banned Books Week is September 22-28 this year, giving folks an opportunity to discuss these topics with their family and friends. Author Brigit Young’s latest novel is Banned Books, Crop Tops and Other Bad Influences, the story of a “good” girl who chooses to think for herself and read a banned book. It’s good! Then she must wrestle with the idea that always rebelling might be just as mindless as always doing what you’re told .
In an exclusive article for Parade, the acclaimed writer talks about banned books, shares some of her favorite works that face censorship and explains how to talk with kids about book banning in general and novels that raise complicated issues. Guess what? They want to talk about them, so get ready. The following is by author Brigit Young.
Five Great Banned Books and How to Discuss Them With Your Kids
Every parent or teacher has had a conversation with a child that follows this general line of questioning: “What? Where? Who? How? Why?” repeating on a loop until a satisfactory answer of some kind has been found or the adult gives up. With challenges to books in school libraries on a continual rise , and the topic making its way into mainstream political discourse , kids are going to have questions.
Middle grade readers (usually considered ages 9 – 12) learn in Social Studies and Civics classes about free speech, while adults in their local or national community engage in vicious fights about what sort of speech kids should be allowed to encounter. As a middle grade author myself, I’ve long felt that kids can take on more substance in novels than adults generally believe. Stories offer a space for children to explore new corners of the world, provide the solace of feeling less alone, and introduce difficult topics through the safety of fiction.
In my new middle grade novel, Banned Books, Crop Tops, and Other Bad Influences , I explore what it’s like to be a curious adolescent in a world in which the surrounding grown-ups desperately want to control information (for a variety of motivations – many quite reasonable!). The conflict over what kids should be allowed to know or not finds its focal point in the debate on book banning in schools.
Below are five books that have been challenged by individual community members or activist groups around the country. They’ve been taken off shelves pending review or successfully banned from schools. Every one of them offers an opening into a conversation with a middle grade reader regarding censorship and speech. With these books, we can ask kids to think critically about which stories ignite calls for removal and why. With kids in my own life, I’ve found that young people are eager to have this dialogue.
Kids may be interested to know that Anne Frank’s original diary, which was published as The Secret Annex in 1947 and then The Diary of a Young Girl in English in 1952, didn’t include the entirety of Anne’s writings. Sections involving some of Anne’s complicated feelings toward her mother, discussions of puberty, and a brief passage involving Anne’s ruminations on same-sex attraction were left out of various editions. Eventually, in the 1980s, a fuller version of the diary entered the larger world, and challenges to the work ensued. In 1982, some parents in Wise County, Virginia deemed the work “sexually offensive ,” and from that point on, it’s been on lists of banned books around the country.
In 2018, Ari Folman and David Polonsky published a widely praised graphic novel of Anne’s iconic story and in the last few years some parents in several states demanded its removal from school libraries. When a Texas teacher shared the graphic novel adaptation with her eighth-grade class, she was fired .
Questions for young readers readily arise: If this is the same Anne we’ve met before in prose, why does the visual representation of her feelings cause such ire? Additionally, is Anne’s relatability as a typical adolescent a key to the importance of the story, and does her romantic curiosity play a part in that relatability? What does sanitizing those feelings do?
An illuminating quote to share in such a discussion may be one from Polonsky, who is quoted by the CBC as saying, “I must admit, I did expect that there would be some pushback on these specific parts in some places. But I didn’t expect that it would come specifically from the United States – and actually only from the United States.” Why us? Why here?
In this exquisitely written novel by Kacen Callender, the blossoming romantic feelings between two girls once again inspired calls for censorship. The American Library Association reports that as of 2023 47% of the censorship attempts were aimed at LGBTQIA+ authors and authors of color. In a study by the Washington Post , 41% percent of books they consider “fully banned” were by queer authors or involved queer storylines. These statistics are essential in discussions of this moment in censorship. Hurricane Child tells the story of Caroline, a twelve-year-old girl deemed “unlucky” for being born in a hurricane in her home of St. Thomas. Her mother left home long ago, she’s bullied at school, and she sees spirits all around her. When a new girl comes to school, Caroline finds a friend and a first crush.
I remember when I first read Hurricane Child . I was set to interview Kacen Callender for a panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival. After the first paragraph, I knew I was holding a masterpiece in my hands. In a dance between straightforward and poetic language, a yearning for love and approval emanates from Callender’s every page.
The stated reason for the removal of this book has most commonly been the presence of LGBTQIA+ content . Middle grade readers can engage with this topic by considering how those challenging this book for its queer content mirror those expressing prejudice in the novel itself. As Caroline wishes for acceptance, she cannot find it even amongst some adult readers. As a society, do we mirror Caroline’s bullies?
This Newberry-award winning novel tells the story of the artistic Jordan’s first year at a highly academic private school. Jordan is Black and must navigate a largely white school. NEW KID has been challenged repeatedly. But unless you’ve been studying the topic or acutely tuned in, it’s honestly difficult when reading this book to figure out what might reasonably cause an uproar over its inclusion on library shelves.
As Jerry Craft himself wrote on X, “I’ve always aimed to create PG books that feature loving families, supportive friends & high morals, with no cursing, sex, drugs, drinking, or violence. But I still have 2 books on the Most Challenged Comics and Most Banned Comics Since 2000.”
Sadly, objections to New Kid involve the fear of and misapplication of the term C.R.T. Critical race theory is an academic framework for understanding society. Kids may be amused to learn that Jerry Craft had never even heard of “C.R.T.” until he was first notified his book was being banned for promoting it.
Yes, Jordan is Black, and sometimes he experiences racism, and that’s a part of his character. Of course it is. For that, the book has been banned. The other aspects of Jordan’s story involve trying to find the right friends, embracing who he is and what his interests are, and worrying what his parents will think of his choices.
Craft told NPR, “A lot of the books with African American protagonists have some… life-changing event, you know, catastrophic, and, you know, death or police, or someone goes to jail, or drugs. And I didn’t want to show that. So there is no catastrophe in New Kid , but it’s just kind of the day-to-day code-switching.”
It may be an enlightening thought experiment for young readers to ponder… what would Jordan’s story be like if everything about the book remained the same except Craft took out any moments of racism and code-switching? Or anything related to negative experiences the main character has because he’s Black in America and at that particular school? Would it still even make sense? Would you get a sense of setting or place? What would be missing? And then, to take it one step further, why would an adult want that sliced out of the story?
As a child, like so many others before and after me, I read Taylor’s classic work of semi-autobiographical fiction depicting the life of a Black family in rural Mississippi in the 1930s over and over. Although the book portrayed a girl whose life looked different from mine in every conceivable way, Taylor’s writing took me inside her characters as their terrifying circumstances unfolded. By stepping into Taylor’s story, I reached a new stage of understanding the history of my country (an understanding I’m working on, forever in-progress). I’ve long expected my own children will read this book, and I’ll discuss with them the very real horror of the past and the forms that horror takes today.
Only a few years ago, the book was challenged in Burbank, California when a white child used racial epithets against a Black child, and said he’d learned them from Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry . Some understandably heartbroken and protective parents fought for the novel to be removed from class reading. They argued the book caused trauma for their kids.
In the instances of this book challenge, kids are faced with the complexity of how to protect students from the use of bigoted, cruel language. How do we teach the most horrific parts of history? How does a novel help or hurt that? Can history realistically be taught without the characters interacting as they really would have at the time? There are no easy answers.
Middle grade readers may benefit from the following quote from Taylor herself : “As a parent I understand not wanting a child to hear painful words, but as a parent I do not understand not wanting a child to learn about a history that is part of America, a history about a family representing millions of families that are strong and loving who remain united and strong, despite the obstacles they face.”
In working on my most recent book, Kelly Yang’s excellent middle grade novel, Front Desk , stuck with me as a prime example of the absurdity of taking a wonderful, critically revered book out of kids’ hands. It follows Mia and her Chinese immigrant parents’ life in the motel they work in.
Kelly Yang and I both had debut middle grade novels come out the same year, and from far-off I felt a kinship with any writer going through the initial struggles encountered by most first-time authors. But Yang’s challenges, as a woman of Chinese heritage writing about characters with her background, were of another magnitude right from the start. They only grew as the book was singled out for removal in Pennsylvania and New York . One parent argued that the book taught children “America is a racist country where all people are not equal” and asked for the book to be removed.
On the contrary, Front Desk tells an inherently patriotic story by following Chinese immigrants who desperately wanted to come to America. They face unforeseen sorrows and hardships in their new life, many based on their ethnicity, but they work to make a home in a place they know holds a better future.
My eldest daughter recently picked up the copy of Front Desk that sits on my shelf of middle grade favorites. I was not surprised to see her devour it in a single day and night. She knows the title of my next book, and that I’ve been worried some people in our town will become enraged by even the suggestion of support for the banned books they’ve heard about. When I told her Front Desk had been challenged, she asked me, gobsmacked, “ Why ?”
Before I could answer her, she queried, “Immigration?”
Upon some further discussion, she expressed she didn’t quite know why she felt immigration was the cause of the challenge, and she didn’t understand why anyone would have a problem with it. But our kids live in this world. They pick up on what adults are angry about and why, and the fact that there is rage facing some groups and not others. Front Desk provides a chance to get a kid’s thoughts on why the struggles of an immigrant family – including explicit racism aimed their way – would be cause for censorship. And why would a character’s experience with racism make it a book that labeled America simply “a racist country”?
Why would a book like Front Desk make any parent so angry they no longer value the author’s freedom of speech, the child’s freedom to read it, or other parents’ right to let their children read what they want?
Let’s work to bring our kids into this heated discussion our country has on children’s books. Let’s let them speak on the censorship happening on their own library shelves. I will be honest that I find it genuinely sad that those who support removing books from school libraries are often missing the opportunity to use a text to help a child understand the world. Kids will learn about the world . And they’ll probably learn about it faster than parents want them to. They will learn about the broad spectrum of humanity, and hopefully they will learn empathy for those whose stories are unlike their own. After all, as is so oft-repeated, books are both a window and a mirror. And with the gift of a book, a parent can discuss their own points of view and hear their kid’s as well. As an author who often gets the opportunity to chat with young readers about what they’re reading, I can guarantee there is no one more passionate about the magic of stories than them.
All rights reserved by Brigit Young; copyright 2024.
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