Banned Books Week 2023

October 1-7, 2023, is Banned Books Week in the United States, and book banning is currently on the rise. In the 2022-23 school year, PEN America recorded 3,362 instances of books banned. This number represents a 33% increase from the 2021-22 school year. Over 40% of all book bans occurred in Florida school districts, but my home state of Texas had the second greatest number of book bans with almost 19% of the total book bans in this country. The majority of banned books are written by women, people of color, or LGBTQ authors, and PEN America notes that many of the new entries on the banned books lists include books about physical abuse, health and well-being, and grief and loss.

I am a believer that knowledge is power, so no matter what your take is on banned books, I hope you will join me this week in thinking about this topic. If you are inclined, choose a book on the banned books list to read on your own. If you are a parent of a school-aged child, make a plan for how you will handle the situation if your child brings home a book you don’t think is suitable. Get involved with your local library or attend a school board meeting. For more information and to find ways to better educate yourself about book bans, please visit: School Book Bans: The Mounting Pressure to Censor - PEN America. 

I can say with confidence that many readers will disagree about what is and is not appropriate for their children to read and when. I know my husband and I discuss book content with our 10-year-old daughter, and we have had to make judgment calls about what is and what is not appropriate for her in all forms of media, sometimes saying no to certain movies or books. This is particularly difficult to navigate when a child’s age may not match up to their reading level. I rely on reviews and suggestions from my trusted mom friends, and sometimes, if my daughter is interested in a particular book that I know may stir up lots of questions, we read it together. Most recently, at our house, that book was Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume. She started reading it on her own, and I asked if we could read it together instead. This turned out to be a great experience for us, but I also know many friends who would choose to wait on that book.    

In preparation for this blog, I dove into the world of banned books. Following are a few that are particularly controversial at the moment and my thoughts on those books. Please note that I am not expressing my thoughts regarding the age when any of these books would or would not be appropriate, as I stated above, that's a decision that we each need to make as parents. My intent here is to offer tools to help educate. 

My book club recently selected Tricks by Ellen Hopkins, which was the number one most banned book of the 2022-2023 school year and is written by the most banned author (two of her other books are in the top 10) in the United States today. The subject matter of this book – child sex trafficking and sexual abuse – is gut wrenching, but I thought Hopkins did an excellent job with the material. The book alternates between the fictional stories of five different teens from totally different backgrounds and how they get involved in the sex trade. I thought this was really eye opening as a parent, but I will say, the content is very difficult and was maybe a little too “adult” for even some of our adult book club members.  The style is 10% poetry and 90% prose, so if you want to read this one, I recommend reading it in hard copy rather than on an e-reader because of the unusual formatting. The book is over 600 pages long, but due to the unique formatting, it’s an extremely quick read.   

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s first novel. Morrison spotlights race and conventional standards of beauty, but the book has been banned based on themes of child sexual abuse, rape, and incest. The Bluest Eye is one of the few books on this list that is not a YA book, and I had read this previously as an adult. Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove prays for her eyes to turn blue, so she can be as pretty and well loved as the blond, blue-eyed children in the United States. Pecola’s life changes in heartbreaking ways. If you haven’t read Morrison before, she is a tremendous (though more often than not, heartbreaking) writer and is not just one of our country’s more talented Black writers or female writers, but one of our country’s most talented writers, full stop. I highly encourage you to check her out.  

Looking for Alaska by John Green is YA coming of age fiction. This is the story of a high school aged boy who is friendless and goes off to boarding school to find the “Great Perhaps.” He soon befriends the beautiful and brilliant, Alaska Young, and a group of brainy misfits. Of all the books on this list, I found this the most difficult to identify why it is so frequently banned. The stated reasons I found in my research include the following: (1) sexually explicit and LGBTQ+ content, but I finished this very recently and sat here puzzling on this one for some time and frankly can’t recall any LGBTQ+ content in this book. That perhaps drives home my concern that many books are banned by adults who haven’t read the actual books. (2) having an oral sex scene, well this one is true, and it’s fairly memorable because of its awkwardness; and (3) bad language and normalizing dishonesty, hazing, underage drinking, and smoking. Was their smoking and cursing, yes? But the other ones, I don’t quite understand. The kids in this book talk about working hard on their studies to get into college, they don’t cheat, and the “hazing” is really in the form of mostly harmless class pranks. And yes, there’s underage drinking, but there is also a very serious consequence to that underage drinking, so I didn’t feel that behavior was glamorized or condoned by the author.

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe is a YA graphic novel memoir about the author’s struggles to understand her own sexuality and gender identity. Some of the illustrations are graphic, but I felt they were graphic in order to convey trauma and not simply to shock. This is a really terrific resource if you are looking to understand gender identity struggles, and the author says that they wrote this so that people like them would know they are not alone. As a heterosexual cisgendered woman, this was really eye opening for me.

Sold by Patricia McCormick is the YA story of thirteen-year-old Lakshmi who lives in severe poverty in a small, leaky hut in the mountains of Nepal. After her family experiences terrible financial ruin in the wake of monsoons that wash away their crops, and her stepfather continues to gamble and drink away what little they have left, Lakshmi is sold into the sex trade. The story is told in the first person, which is tremendously effective, as Lakshmi has no idea what is happening to her. Again, this is difficult reading material, but it is well researched and an excellent exposition of child sex trafficking and also of poverty.

I hope this post helps you as you think about this issue and offers some useful resources.