Removing library books from the shelf for later review is essentially banning them, no matter what the censors say. My experience with book challenges and removal are here on my Substack “Be a Cactus.”.
I’ve moved to Substack for most of my posting, and I hope you will join me there. It’s a friendly place for writers and readers. I discuss libraries, books, and the craft of writing. There’s some great work going on there!
Meet the Moon by Kerry L. Malawista
Jody (AKA Stringbean) is navigating adolescence in the early 1970s. She contemplates the moon and the stars with her mom. They worry together over the fate of the astronauts of Apollo 13 and whether those men will burn up on re-entry to Earth. One of five children, Jody has the typical issues of a thirteen- to fourteen-year-old girl of the era, the sort that easily resolves when teens grow up: Does her crush like her back? Will her breasts develop like her older sister’s have (and why are small bras called training bras anyway)? What will she wear to the dance?
Jody also experiences tragedy that no teen should have to face: her mom dies in a car accident. So while she’s negotiating the usual troubles, she is also facing larger life issues. Why can’t her mom be saved here on earth when scientists can save the Apollo 13 astronauts in space? Can her mom see or hear her or even be felt as a ghost? Was Jody’s behavior—she told her mom that she wished she would die—responsible for her mom’s accident? How is the family to get through each day?
With the death of their mother, things radically change for the Moran children. Their dad is still working hard on his tile business and the older kids—Claire and Jody—take on some of the responsibility for the younger ones. Meanwhile, the three younger children have a hard time understanding that their mother is never going to return. The added responsibility of mothering is too much for Jody. She campaigns to have her beloved Grandma Cupcakes live with the family, but after grandma arrives, it becomes clear that caring for five kids is too much for her at her age and conflicts abound.
Jody starts to think that a new wife for her dad will help to resolve the family’s problems. But does that mean she is forgetting her mother or doesn’t love her enough?
I found Meet the Moon because I’m still looking for books from small publishers. Fitzroy Books is the YA imprint of Regal House Publishing. (I reviewed and recommended another Regal House title, Girlz in the Hood.) I saw the blurb for Meet the Moon from Alice McDermott. And while I know that blurbs are sometimes favors to authors or publishers, I loved McDermott’s National Book Award-winning Charming Billy, so I thought I’d give Meet the Moon a try.
Meet the Moon has an emotional depth that I appreciate in a YA novel. Each of the characters—all five children and their father—are well drawn individuals. Each has his or her own grief over the death of their mom/wife and uses their own coping mechanisms to deal with it. Jody is observant and a keen judge of character.
This would be a good addition to a library collection, a title to recommend to students who have lost a family member and to thoughtful students who contemplate big life issues.
I’m still on the lookout for small press books. I grabbed these two on my last trip to the public library.
On the shelf, Whiteout looked like a small press cover to me because it it had that rebind look—a high quality rebind like you might find from Permabound. When I got the book home, I saw it wasn’t that at all. It was a large print edition from Gale/Cengage of a book originally published by Quill Tree Books.
Whiteout is a romance on overdrive with multiple couples finding their way through their relationship issues while all working to repair—under a very tight deadline—the relationship of a couple with whom they are friends. It’s probably a book solely for avid romance fans, but if the reader is a romance fan, they will love it!
The novel takes place in Atlanta as Christmas approaches. A snowstorm takes the city by surprise just as the characters spring into action to help create an epic apology and declaration of love between the two central characters, Stevie and Sola. Everyone is dealing with missed texts, missed calls, traffic jams, and unhappy parents.
The book is dedicated to Black teens and is about Black teen love. It’s written by six very successful YA authors—Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk, and Nicola Yoon. What I loved about that is that the storyline worked. That is the novel wasn’t a jumble of writing styles and artificial twists where consecutive authors try to reroute the story.
My only other experience in reading a book by many authors was The Whole Family, a 19th-century project of William Dean Howells. Howells had a good idea, but the novel is a hot mess because each author tried to change the story and negate what the last one wrote. Howells and Henry James were the most famous authors of the bunch. And reading it was an interesting look into author egos. (If you’re interested, there’s a Wikipedia article about it and it is available on Project Gutenberg.) But, as a cohesive work, it was a failure. And this is what makes me appreciate the authors of Whiteout.
The second novel I picked up, One with the Waves, is a small press work. The publisher is Santa Monica Press, which I assumed was in Santa Monica, CA, but it’s in Solano Beach. It’s a coming of age story about a girl who is dealing with grief over the sudden death of her father. Ellie lives in the New York garment district, but after her dad dies, her mother sends her to California to live with her aunt and uncle, who are avid surfers. Surfing becomes integral to Ellie’s healing.
One with the Waves takes place in the 1980s and has a lot of interiority. The reader can learn a lot about surfing. I was excited about finding Santa Monica Press. However, thought they have ventured into publishing YA books, they only produce YA novels that are historical. And, of course, the 1980s are history to high school students.
Whiteout would be a good book to display or book talk before the winter holidays. One with the Waves would work before spring break.
Pest is a fun, short and offbeat YA novel.
I picked up Pest at the library when I went to get a new library card. I like to look around for books from indie publishers that don’t get the press that books from the Big Five do. This one caught my eye. Love the cover. When I read on the cover copy that the protagonist lives in Santa Barbara, CA and is desperate to make her exit, I wanted to find out why. I went to college in Santa Barbara and my roommates and I were all aching to live there permanently. But none of us had the money for such a pricey area, so off we went after graduation. (“This was Santa Barbara, after all, a town where every parking lot looked like a Range Rover rally.”) What would make a teen want to flee from one of the country’s most beloved destinations?
Hallie (Hal) doesn’t have the stereotypical Santa Barbara life. Her divorced parents are opposites. Her woo-woo mom owns a pond cleaning service and her libertarian dad owns a pest control business. Hal works part time at the pest control, exterminating a variety of bugs as well as vermin. For this, she is known as ‘bug girl’ at school. She also does periodic shifts at a golf course. Her working class life continually brings her in contact with the wealthy of Santa Barbara and the uber-wealthy of Montecito. For teens who are unfamiliar with Montecito, that’s where Oprah and the Sussexs (Prince Harry and Meghan Markle) live. Hal’s evaluation: “Rich Montecito weirdos made all other rich weirdos look like amateurs.”
Hal’s parents are at odds in a childish way. While they compete for time with her, neither actually does much of anything she likes. They mostly want her to listen to their drama and do work. Hal’s plan upon graduation is to attend a prestigious college in the east, putting a continent between her and her parents. Her tight work schedule is necessary if she is to achieve this. Even so, it’s not enough. She’s also depending on the Verhaag Scholarship.
Unfortunately, the Verhaag Scholarship always goes to a Verhaag family member if one happens to be graduating from Santa Barbara High School that year. In Hal’s senior year, a Verhaag family member transfers into SBHS, and Hal needs to quickly find some extracurricular activities to boost her college applications in case the scholarship falls through—though through a funny loophole, it seems she still has a chance.
Some pretty crazy antics ensue as Hal ends up trying to solve a mystery in order to belong to the yearbook staff and ends up landing herself in crime scene. She also gets unexpected help in her college quest from her rich, hot neighbor whom she had always thought of as a self-centered jerk.
“Basically I’m surrounded by Spencer Salazar. My house occupies one of the tiny parcels of land along the street that the fifties-ear developers of our seaside neighborhood carved out of the deep, oceanfront lots. Spencer’s dad purchased the houses on both sides of mine and demolished them, building a garage to the left and a swimming pool and cabana to the right. (My dad declined to sell, so the Salazars’ pétanque court remains an unrealized dream.) Behind all of this, their house stretches along 150 feet of cliff-top ocean frontage, offering the Salazar an unobstructed view of the Pacific and the Channel Islands beyond. I, on the other hand, have an unobstructed view of the six-foot wall that separates my yard from Spencer’s.”
There’s a bit of romance here, but whether the reader will enjoy the final act of the novel depends on how quirky they like their endings. It’s pretty wacky and some fun for those who are looking for the not-so-typical novel.
It’s already week nine of AudioFile’s Sync summer program. I just wanted to add a reminder today because Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out is free through this coming Wednesday, June 28. This is one of the books that is a target of the current book banning movement.
At the time we purchased Beyond Magenta for our library, we had a young adult teacher’s aide who was transitioning genders. The students had questions, and this was one of the books that had lots of voices giving answers.
Download for free by signing up for the summer program at https://audiobookSYNC.com . Have a listen for yourself. Grab Loveless for free as well. After that, you’ll get notification for each of the remaining weeks of the fourteen week program.
The AudioFile Sync program is already in its third week! I always wish it started a little later, when it felt like summer, so I wouldn’t miss the beginning. Below are this week’s books. I’m grabbing The School that Escaped the Nazis. It feels like time to be inspired by good people.
Here is the back cover info directly quoted from the publisher:
“In 1933, the same year Hitler came to power, schoolteacher Anna Essinger saved her small, progressive school from Nazi Germany. Anna had read Mein Kampf and knew the terrible danger that Hitler’s hate-fueled ideologies posed to her pupils, so she hatched a courageous and daring plan: to smuggle her school to the safety of England.
“As the school she established in Kent, England, flourished despite the many challenges it faced, the news from her home country continued to darken. Anna watched as Europe slid toward war, with devastating consequences for the Jewish children left behind. In time, Anna would take in orphans who had given up all hope: the survivors of unimaginable horrors. Anna’s school offered these scarred children the love and security they needed to rebuild their lives.
“Featuring moving firsthand testimony from surviving pupils, and drawing from letters, diaries, and present-day interviews, The School that Escaped the Nazis is a dramatic human tale that offers a unique perspective on Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. It is also the story of one woman’s refusal to allow her belief in a better world to be overtaken by hatred and violence.”
I’m so excited about this special issue from Inlandia! It’s a celebration of libraries and librarians. As a former high school teacher librarian, I will be guest editing. If you are a librarian and also a writer, we want your creative work on ANY subject (which may include libraries). If you are not a librarian, but have a story to tell/artwork about libraries or librarians, please submit!
Inlandia: A Literary Journey is the online journal of the Inlandia Institute, whose mission is to promote literary culture. While the institute focuses on inland Southern California, the journal has published work from all over the world. The spring issue is teens only, so if you’d like to have a look at a regular issue, check the fall issues. No fee/no pay.
Submit from now until June 30, 2023. Here are links:
Submissions:
Https://tinyurl.com/InlandiaLibrarians
I used to be the managing editor. Here’s the last issue I did: https://inlandiajournal.net/fall-issue-2021/ (Fall issues are general issues. The spring issues are teens only.)
It’s pretty easy to navigate—if you click on the first image, it goes to the table of contents.
Hoping to see your work!
Ninth House was a Goodreads Best Fantasy Choice 2019.
I picked up Ninth House thinking it was YA fantasy. I only understood it as adult fiction by listening to the author interview at the end of the audiobook. I would have labeled it “new adult” because it deals with many of the same issues we find in YA, but more explicitly, and because the important characters are so young.
I was unaware of the kerfuffle surrounding the call for trigger warnings for Ninth House in 2019 because I don’t pay much attention to Twitter. I looked it up after finishing the second book in the series, Hell Bent.
“Her latest novel, her publisher would like you to know, is not YA. Ninth House is an impressive achievement, a book for adults that tackles many of the same themes as her earlier novels—the lingering specter of trauma, the lengths people go to survive, the power unjustly wielded by the wealthy at the expense of the supposedly powerless—but with more grit.” –Angela Lashbrook in Vice
This series takes place at Yale University, where old societies have a dark underbelly. They are the keepers of magic, and they use it to maintain privilege and power. This concept–making a deal with the devil to propel worldly success–is an old one. But placing it on an Ivy League university campus where privilege is a routine aspect of life, and using students to improve the lives of alumni is a fun take on the old trope. (Fun in that way that creepy demonic creatures and behaviors in books are enjoyable. I don’t want to suggest anyone would want to live this narrative.)
Alex (Galaxy) Stern had been a Los Angeles teen adrift in a sea of drugs, a drug-dealing boyfriend and a resistance to rehab. For reasons that become clear early in the book, at twenty, after surviving a multiple homicide, she’s offered a full ride to Yale and a position of power within the House of Lethe. Lethe monitors the activities of Yale’s eight other secret societies. (Thus it is the ninth house.) These societies perform occult rituals to get or to retain power among students and alumni. They do some pretty terrible things like drug and cut up street people in order to use them in rituals to foretell the future.
Alex becomes Lethe’s ‘Dante’ and is learning the ways of magic as well as its history under the tutelage of Darlington, Lethe’s ‘Virgil.’ She’s been selected because she can see ghosts (called grays in the novel). The novel moves back and forth in time, winter to spring. We learn that Darlington is missing after some botched magic, and that Alex blames herself. Her goal is to retrieve him from wherever he might have landed–the borderlands or hell being two strong possibilities.
A girl is murdered in New Haven and her death is written off pretty quickly. She’s not a student, but something of a street girl. Which, of course, reminds Alex of herself. She feels the need to dig into the facts and finds help in the curmudgeonly cop Turner, who also doesn’t want to see the true killer to get away. More and more, it seems that the murder has something to do with the nine secret societies at Yale. More and more, it appears that many murdered/missing girls and young women of New Haven’s past are connected to the existence and rituals of the secret societies.
As Alex investigates the murder, she uses all sorts of magic available to her. Types of magic conveniently appear as needed. Nevertheless, the experience is hard for Alex because it pulls up PTSD. She flashes back to a number of harrowing experiences during her childhood and then as a young adult. Through her determination, she overcomes some of her past issues.
Hell Bent continues where Ninth House leaves off. Alex has to seek help from her friends at Yale. There’s Mercy, her roommate. Pamela Dawes, an introverted grad student working on her PhD, is Lethe’s ‘oculus,’ a research assistant who maintains safehouses. These and others work with Alex to stave off demons, vampires, and more. All while searching for a way to make Darlington whole again.
What’s great about Alex’s relationships with her friends is that they consistently come through for her. She learns a lot from Darlington, who seeks to protect her from the darker elements of the occult. Dawes saves her life more than once. Mercy trusts her even though some of her behavior is questionable. All this enables Alex to succeed in her missions. She is not the superhero upon whom everyone relies. This was the most enjoyable aspect of both books–that a young woman who had been through incredible trauma can figure out whom to trust and overcome her trauma in doing so.
With all the outcry about Ninth House needing trigger warnings, does this series belong in the high school library? (NB: I wouldn’t add this series to a collection for students younger than high school age.)
I think it’s fair to say that if you have Stephen King and Dean Koontz in your library, you’ve already got books with similar levels of trauma, violence, and gross stuff. I can see making a case for trigger warnings on the Alex Stern series–this might actually help high school libraries in serving their students–but if the industry decides to put warnings on the books, they should include those of male authors, a point that Bardugo has made herself.
Yet the Alex Stern series is different from King and Koontz horror novels; it’s about teen and young adult trauma, PTSD, survival and eventual healing. It might lift a teen who has experienced some dark things.
Putting content warnings in the inside cover of books isn’t unreasonable, and a librarian might choose to do it. The warnings suggested on Twitter for Ninth House seem endless. But here are several reasonable warnings:
Hell Bent–which by the way, has a perfect book cover–ends with the call to a new quest. I won’t be reading anymore of the series should it arrive. (Fun fact–though Book 3 does not exist, it has a 4.83 star rating on Goodreads. Oh to be loved!) There is much in the books that encourages traumatized people to work through the darkness. There is success. The idea of an elite school and its wealthy patrons relying on magic and refusing to protect the surrounding community from itself is a great metaphor for the reality of privilege. But the books are overlong. Alex’s unrealistic, repeated opportunities to get things right, to help others and right the wrongs against them have grown wearisome. The repeated trips to hell are starting to feel gratuitous. In short, though I enjoyed much, I’m burnt out.
Happy launch day to my chapbook “The Mortality of Dogs and Humans.”
Today’s the launch day for my chapbook The Mortality of Dogs and Humans.
I added it here on School Library Lady because I think it will appeal to teens. For many young people, their first experience of grief will be the loss of the family dog. I think this little chapbook will help them get through that and remind them of the beauty that dogs bring to their lives. Since this is a chapbook (70ish pages), it would sit well on a spinner or tabletop display with books for reluctant readers/’quick reads/grab and go.’
I think the two quotes below do a good job of defining it. I hope you enjoy it. It’s time for me to have a piece of cake. 😉
“In her chapbook memoir, The Mortality of Dogs and Humans, Victoria Waddle explores her (our) relationship with dogs, the joy and comfort of their companionship, and the lessons they can teach us about being better humans. By sharing her memories of Fletcher and Zainy, she shows everyone else what dog people already know: that dogs are individuals (with specific personalities, quirks, and anxieties, just like the rest of us) and how our relationship with them changes from one dog to the next. She shows how it is through their interaction with dogs that the truth of a person is revealed. This book is an examination of our responsibility to those we love, and the (sometimes impossible) difficulty of taking care of them, especially those who are beyond our communication. Waddle captures the pain of deciding when, exactly, a dog is suffering more than living and, in comparison, forces the reader to wonder why we allow our beloved elderly to suffer more than our beloved pets. Dog people, as they read this book, will instantly get it. Cat people will get it. Non pet owners, those poor lost souls, will get it (and they might even be converted).”
—Tim Hatch, poet and author of Wild Embrace
“Victoria is able to share the realities of the love and loss of our most precious furbabies in an honest way that we can all relate to. Her sharing of her experiences, her devotion, and resilience, are heartfelt and heartbreaking. Also relating to her personal family struggles and loss make this a story that brings home what love really is all about.”
—Randi Lui, former Search and Rescue K9 handler and Dog Unit Leader
The Mortality of Dogs and Humans is available from the publisher, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, and Amazon.
Back in 2011, writing for the Wall Street Journal, Meghan Cox Guerdon began a heated debate over whether young adult literature was too dark and explicit. Seen simplistically, YA fiction represented either a bastion against censorship or a destroyer of adolescents, who could otherwise avoid foul language, absent parents, molestation, or suicide.
That debate was a tiff compared to today’s battle over teen books, with book censorship having reached the national stage. While earlier censors may have feared the violence of The Hunger Games, today’s censors want to erase reality. Sexuality, sexual abuse, STDs, race, oppression, and slavery are verboten. Parents can search school library catalogs for words such as ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ (as one Spotsylvania County parent did), and demand removal of titles they are completely unfamiliar with.
As a former high school teacher librarian, I find this brave new world alarming. Speaking to the Tennessee House of Representatives, country music star John Rich compared school librarians to pedophiles for including “obscene books” in their collections. The state of Virginia encourages informants to call a tip line to report teachers whose materials are “divisive.” Texas, under the supervision of state Rep. Matt Krause (R-Fort Worth), chairman of the House General Investigating Committee, has created a list of over 800 suspect books.
The Washington Post finds the Texas list “anything but painstakingly curated. It’s as if someone typed in the keywords ‘Black,’ ‘racism,’ ‘LGBT,’ ‘gender’ and ‘transgender’ and simply poured the results into a spreadsheet.” I’m guessing “sex” was included in the keywords since Everything You Need to Know about Going to the Gynecologist is on the list. In fact, many Need to Know books are suspect: About Teen Pregnancy, About Teen Motherhood, About Growing Up Male or Female.
And yet, the Everything You Need to Know series is widely available in middle and high school libraries. Teacher librarians purchase these titles because they are ‘hi-low.’ Highly informative and engaging, but written at a level that almost all students will comprehend.
Book censorship is far more threatening than it was ten years ago because it erases anyone who doesn’t look or think like the censor. Right now many teens who are stigmatized won’t find books validating their experiences. This matters. As the character of C.S. Lewis says in William Nicholson’s “Shadowlands,” “We read to know we are not alone.” Silencing diverse stories segues into an effort to protect teens from uncomfortable narratives. A parent’s objection to the assignment of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” in an AP literature class made me wonder: When should students study difficult subjects? The goal of AP classes, after all, is to earn college credit.
I recently tried a random experiment using two YA novels I’d read this summer, books I recommend to teens. Do they offend the censors? Are they on the suspect book list? They are certainly in school libraries. Teacher librarians seek recommendations from professional review journals such as Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal prior to making purchases. Both books were positively reviewed. (Despite hysterical accusations, there’s little chance of actual obscene materials landing in the collection.)
The End of Our Story by Meg Haston deals with the break up of a first love. But it also delves into family secrets, domestic violence, teen sexuality and profanity. The End generates lots of discomfort. It also creates empathy, an understanding that anyone may be fighting a secret, difficult battle.
Published in 2017, The End deals with topics censors now rally against. Yet I didn’t find it on Texas’ list of suspect books. I’m guessing that’s because it can’t be found in a search using the keywords listed above. Significantly, the characters are White.
Kirkus, a well-regarded review journal, called Bitter (2022) by Akwaeke Emezi “A compact, urgent, and divine novel.” The protagonist studies at a school for creatives. Through her artwork, she joins students from a nearby school to protest social injustice. In doing so, she unleashes an avenging angel who causes damage and death.
The characters in Bitter are, generally, Black and queer. Their desire for social justice serves as an entry to discussion about the subject. Bitter also engenders conversation about the role of creatives and their contributions to society, a discussion that is anathema to censors. It would be a great teen book club choice. It’s a recently published prequel to Pet, which is on Texas’ list of suspect books. If the list is updated in the future, I know where Bitter will land.
Access to such novels provides teens the opportunity to develop a trifecta of life skills: compassion, imaginative thinking, and the ability to analyze and evaluate ideas. As Barbara Kingsolver noted, “Fiction has a unique capacity to bring difficult issues to a broad readership . . ., creating empathy in a reader’s heart for the theoretical stranger. Its capacity for invoking moral and social responsibility is enormous.”
A vocal minority can keep marginalized students from books that validate their lives. The same minority can keep all teens from accessing works that empathize with historically underrepresented people. As a parent who raised thoughtful readers, I can’t imagine allowing other parents to make that choice.
Anti-censorship parent groups are forming, a positive development. Yet, as if it were a meaningful way to fight back, many people have taken to their social media accounts to make two suggestions: take the books that are removed from school libraries and put them in the public library; and build a little box library in your yard and stock it with forbidden books. Neither of these is a good solution.
Many students, particularly those with few resources, can’t get to their public library, which may not be within walking distance of their home. The school library meets its patrons where they’re at. And little yard libraries, while often very cute, quickly become tiny storage facilities for neighborhood book discards. The school library has thousands of books on hundreds of subjects, and is regularly weeded and updated. It also has, importantly, one or more employees who are dedicated to providing service to the school population. If equity matters to you, fight like hell for the school library and its staff.
As the school year begins, encourage any teens you know to read widely. To read wildly! Tell them to introduce themselves to their school librarians. Teacher librarians are a great resource for readers’ advisory. They welcome all and relish getting the right book into the right hands at the right time.
School Library Lady 