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Hearing the controversy over this book I decided to learn what all the hubbub was about.
The book is considered a “graphic novel.” I’m of an age where graphic means “plainly shown or described” and “using offensive or obscene words.” I figured that was what got so many people upset. However, while there is some vulgar language, it is not much worse than what one might hear partially bleeped on television.
There is no nudity or any overt sexual contact beyond kissing.
What “graphic” means is “pictorial.” It’s a comic book.
The story is centered around an eleventh-grade girl, Amanda. She is being raised in a strict Catholic family reinforced by friends and nuns in the parochial school she attends.
There is a dark family secret that strains her parents’ relationship. Amanda thinks her father is having an affair. However, with sleuthing she discovers the dark family secret is that her paternal grandmother, Samantha, whom she never knew, was a homosexual, ostracized by the family.
As Amanda struggles with her family history, she begins to struggle with her own sexuality and the ridicule that brings. Apparently the source of objection by some readers or, perhaps more correctly, “non-readers.”
There’s an overabundance of teenage angst for my stoic upbringing.
We do view our lives with a magnifying glass. At the focal point of that magnifying glass is ourselves. N owhere in life is that self-image larger than the period passing from child to adult. Many never learn to lift that glass away from themselves enough to enlarge others and see their travails.
Some critics might have found that tiresome.
Most of the characters are stereotypes, lacking depth and complexity. They are clichés of people with differing views of sexuality.
Sound like a soap opera? Another possible objection. But I’m not doing a book review.
My concern is with those who insist on banning a book they find objectionable from our libraries.
They do have a right to raise their children according to their own beliefs, so long as those beliefs are legal and not negligent or abusive.
However, their demand to ban a book to “protect” their children is also banning that book from children whose parents want them to understand the questions such a book raises and form their own opinions.
Should a censor’s view be foisted on a whole community?
Parents have the right to control what their children see and read, but it’s their responsibility to enforce that rule, not everybody else’s.
The amount of offensive and harmful information and entertainment is unlimited and mixed in with every media children access. The great gateway of television and the Internet leads into that universe. It’s the parents’ duty to monitor what their children watch and the games they play.
If they’re not dealing with that, then the small leak the library might drip into their children’s worldly education is nothing compared to the flood that rushes all around and through their lives with much more dangerous outcomes.
Banning books is the last defense of ideas that are easily challenged and debunked by an honest look at facts and history.
It’s what motivated Nazis’ and Communists’ massburnings of differing books and treatises.
If censorship is necessary to protect someone’s beliefs, perhaps those beliefs need to be examined for their validity.
Long ago educators abandoned making the left-handed use their right hand, and courts threw out laws against interracial marriage, both stifling individual differences and intruding on personal choices.
But what is lost in book banning is more than years and centuries of thoughts and ideas.
The most valuable thing lost is the opportunity for connecting with our children.
The maelstrom outside our homes that they must navigate to adulthood is a dangerous place to contend with alone. Hazards are there whether we choose to cloister our children or expose them to ideas we believe they should learn and understand, making it their own choice to confront or embrace.
I’m too old to appreciate the genre of this book, but I could see myself sitting down with a child and sharing the experience of reading it. Children need guidance in making their conclusions in the challenges that come their way at any moment in every day. They are still forming their own beliefs, the ones they will have when they rightfully outgrow our dated input.
And, if my mind is equally free to look inside and grow, that child might offer insights into my own fears and prejudices.
