Ban this Book is a perfect read for any time of year, but it feels especially apt at the beginning of the school year. Narrator Amy Anne Ollinger is a child most at home in books. She lives at the library, and because the librarian has a rule that the same book cannot be checked out more than twice in a row, she keeps an up-to-the-minute calendar of when she can go back to check out and re-read her favourites. The battle over banned books begins when she goes looking (desperately! eagerly!) for The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and it’s gone. A school parent has taken it upon herself to go over the head of the librarian and strip the shelves of books she deems inappropriate.
Amy Anne is enlisted by the librarian to help fight what the principal steadfastly refuses to call censorship, but at the first school council meeting, when she has a chance to voice her concerns, Amy Anne is unable to summon the courage to deliver the speech she has prepared. Painfully shy, as many booklovers are, she falters when her voice is so badly needed.
The first person narration of the book works brilliantly here. We are told what the people in Amy Anne’s life are not. We have a privileged insight into all the turmoil, anger, sarcasm and humour that runs under her silence. Amy Anne begins covertly loaning banned books from her locker, getting great books into the hands of both avid and reluctant readers, and we see her struggle to balance her shyness and her enthusiasm for the books.
I loved every line of this book. I especially loved that Amy Anne does not have a straight path to success and makes a lot of mistakes on the way.
Most of all, I love that Amy Anne is a Black narrator through whose eyes we see the world. In the first chapter, when she describes the librarian as “a big white lady,” I was brought up short and realized with embarrassment that I had assumed the narrator was white. This in spite of the cover art.
That’s how privilege works. We see ourselves effortlessly.
Youngest, who is in Grade 6 and who loved this book as much as I did, came with me last week to a panel discussion moderated by Zalika Reid-Benta at the Toronto Reference Library for Well-Read Black Girl, an anthology edited by Glory Edim. It was a wonderful and uplifting discussion of community, legacy and the importance of libraries in the formation of a writer’s craft and voice.
Renee Watson described how she has a non-negotiable rule about cover art for her work. The skin tone of the characters on the cover has to fit the content of the book. (Amy Anne, too, insists that we see her, and she describes her skin tone in relation to her parents’ and her siblings’.)
There was much to love about the conversation, but one image that stuck with me is that books are mirrors and windows for kids to see themselves and the world. Racialized and LGBTQIA+ kids especially need those mirrors and windows in a world that is almost always white and straight by default. Describing the work of Jacqueline Woodson, Renee Watson writes,
That is who Jacqueline is writing for. The child in the back of the classroom, the one buried in a book, creating paragraphs in a hidden journal. She is writing mirror books for young Black children who need to see themselves in the pages of a story. She is writing window books for readers to strengthen the muscle of empathy and look into someone else’s world.
Banned books unfairly target those who need the windows and mirrors the most, which is what makes this particular brand of bullying so abhorrent to me.
It was Banned Book Week last week, an occasion to seek out, read and discuss the books that have been banned at schools. The list of books most often banned in 2018 is notable for its censorship of and discrimination against LGBTQIA+ content. Sigh.
There is a lot of work to be done out there, Readers! Kids need mirrors and windows! Go be the voice that champions banned books! Go have some fun reading! Spread the word about your favourites! Get the books that kids need onto their library shelves!
image credit
Nathalie Foy 