Tundra Telegram: Books That You’re Not Allowed To Read

Hello, and thanks for joining us at Tundra Telegram, the column where we wade into the fraught subjects and hot-button topics of the day, and weed out books that they don’t want you to know about!

Banned Books Week starts this Sunday, October 1. For the uninitiated, Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in libraries, bookstores, and schools. The annual event highlights the value of free and open access to information and brings together the entire book community. And – some bad news for those of you who haven’t been following the news – book bans unfortunately are on the rise.

Accordingly, we have selected some of the most banned books for young readers that we publish. These are titles most often forbidden from school (and sometimes public) libraries. Many of these books appear on conservative activist Moms for Liberty‘s challenged book list, used in school boards and communities across North America to remove titles from shelves. We’ve listed some highlights below, and included (some highly editorialized) reasons often cited for their removal. And if you’d like to find out some of the things Penguin Random House is doing in response to the book bans, you can find out more here. So, do something subversive this week and read a book for the sake of freedom!

PICTURE BOOKS

One of the most challenged picture books is Antiracist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi and Ashley Lukashevsky, a book that introduces the youngest readers and the grown-ups in their lives to the concept and power of antiracism. Providing the language necessary to begin critical conversations at the earliest age, the book aims in several easy steps to build a more equitable world. One must presume the book is so often challenged as certain people would prefer their babies to be racist (?).

Bafflingly, the popular (and New York Times bestselling) picture book All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold and Suzanne Kaufman is also often challenged by school boards. The book follows a group of diverse children through a day in their school, where everyone is welcomed with open arms. It’s a school where students from all backgrounds learn from and celebrate each other’s traditions. So, you can see why it’s so dangerous in a society where all are (in fact) not welcome.

Likewise, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water by Nikole Hannah-Jones and Renée Watson, illustrated Nikkolas Smith, has been banned in communities across the United States (mainly), as it chronicles the history of slavery and Black resistance in America. And that makes some people feel bad about themselves. (Immediate ban!)

LGBTQ+ titles are among the most challenged and banned books in the current landscape, so you had better bet I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, and illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas gets banned all the time. The book is the real-life story of co-author Jazz Jennings, a transgender child who has become a spokesperson for trans kids everywhere.

As you can imagine, rainbows also find themselves under attack, so My Rainbow, by authors DeShanna and Trinity Neal, and illustrated by Art Twink, is usually in the book banners’ crosshairs. The book tells the story of transgender girl Trinity, who decides she needs long hair, so her dedicated mom creates her the perfect rainbow-colored wig. (Maybe the anti-wig lobby is behind this ban, as well.)

Closer to home, Canadian Elise Gravel has been subjected to bans and removals with her book Pink, Blue, and You!: Questions for Kids about Gender and Stereotypes, a collaboration with educator Mykaell Blais. Perhaps that’s because the book opens the door to conversations about gender stereotypes and everyone’s right to be their true selves, though some claim instead this is a book about “lies and false genders.”

The picture book biography of Gyo Fujikawa, It Began with a Page by Kyo Maclear and Julie Morstad, also found itself in a few school book bans (among a bunch of books included in a package that features stories of equity and healthy racial identity). The book spotlights the life of the groundbreaking illustrator, including her and her family’s internment during World War II, but some parent groups found the retelling of actual American history “divisive,” “racist,” and “socialist.”

How did an Eric Carle book end up on a most-banned book list? Well, his Draw Me a Star, a celebration of imagination that follows a young artist through life, beginning and ending with his drawing of a star, has been banned and challenged because it depicts a naked man and woman – even though his nude renditions of caterpillars have gone largely unchallenged.

CHAPTER BOOKS & MIDDLE GRADE

There’s no better reward for being the first Black child to desegregate your all-white elementary school in Louisiana than having the book about your experience banned from schools around the country. That’s what happened to Ruby Bridges and her book for kids, This Is Your Time, a book she wrote to inspire readers to continue the struggle for liberty and justice. (Obviously, certain folks dislike that kind of thing.)

Speaking of books that depict America’s historic racism, Jacqueline Woodson‘s award-winning memoir in verse Brown Girl Dreaming also takes place during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 1970s in both South Carolina and New York. Accordingly, it has become one of the many books by Black authors banned in school systems that restrict the  discussion of systemic racism.

And teachers, parents, and young readers in Ontario’s Durham county probably remember when David A. Robertson‘s novel The Great Bear, the second book in The Misewa Saga, was pulled from school board shelves. Despite being beloved by thousands of kids, this Narnia-inspired Indigenous fantasy series was allegedly removed from that district’s school libraries for contains too much “culture and ceremony.”

With a word like “sex” in the title, you just know some square is going to take issue. That’s how Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth‘s highly acclaimed book of sex education, Sex Is a Funny Word, found itself the subject of many book challenges and bans. The book has been praised as a valuable resource about bodies, gender, and sexuality for children ages 8 to 10 as well as their parents and caregivers, but it’s been banned because, to quote another Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth book … you know, sex.

The transgender ghost story Too Bright To See by Kyle Lukoff has also been banned in several school districts. In the book, best friends Moira and Bug spend the summer before middle school investigating a haunting in Bug’s eerie old house while Bug begins to realize they may be transgender. You will not be surprised to discover the ghosts are not the part of the story that fill certain adults with fear. “It will almost certainly be banned in many places,” The New York Times prophetically announced, “but your child almost certainly needs to read it.”

Include in the massive list of books by LGBTQ+ authors that are regularly banned Trung Le Nguyen‘s massively acclaimed The Magic Fish, a queer coming of age comic that weaves an immigrant narrative through a fairy tale fabric. The ban seems to be entirely based on the fact that a gay main character exists, as the book doesn’t even feature a single kiss. As the author has noted himself, “It’s very strange and a little bit sad.”

YOUNG ADULT

What are the most banned YA books? Surprise, surprise: they’re usually written by authors who are not white. Case in point: This Is My America by Kim Johnson, a debut novel that looks at the history of racism in the American justice system through a girl with a father and brother who both have devastating encounters with the police. It’s a story ripped from the headlines, but book banners have decided there’s only one America. And this book is not it.

Johnson’s book is a bit newer, but Dear Martin, the 2017 novel from Nic Stone, has been around long enough to face a few years of bans and challenges. The book tells the story of Justyce, a good kid put in handcuffs without cause, who looks to the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to see if they have any place in modern America. Opponents of the book cite what they see as “anti-police sentiment.”

Author Frederick Joseph was heartbroken to learn his book The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person was banned in Texas middle schools. The book is a conversation starter about things like cultural appropriation, power dynamics, white privilege, and “reverse racism” – ironic, as it was argued the book promoted racism against white people. (Or perhaps white people just thought the title was false; it wasn’t possible to be any better.)

People love to ban queer YA, as well. A book named Two Boys Kissing, like David Levithan‘s, makes for an easy target. Even if it weren’t for the content – narration from a Greek Chorus of a generation of gay men lost to AIDS, two seventeen-year-olds attempting to set a new Guinness World Record with a kissing marathon – the cover features, well, two boys kissing, which was enough to not only drive some libraries to ban it, but religious activists to burn it live on Facebook (!).

This banning impulse also hit  Malinda Lo‘s Last Night at the Telegraph Club, which has been challenged and outright banned in schools in a number of states. A lesbian love story between a Chinese American and white American set in 1950s San Francisco, it won the National Book Award in 2021. During the acceptance speech, Lo talked about the “pressure to remove books about people of color, LGBTQ people, and especially transgender people from classrooms and libraries. I urge every one of you watching to educate yourselves . . . we need your support to keep our stories on the shelves. Don’t let them erase us.”

Canadian E.K. Johnston has also felt the sting of book challenges with her Exit, Pursued by a Bear, a powerful story about the aftermath of a cheerleader’s sexual assault. The novel has been challenged both on the basis of the assault itself, and its frank discussion of abortion.

There are few YA authors (or affordable drug activists) bigger than John Green. Yet his Looking for Alaska has been challenged and banned over the years for being “pornographic” and “vulgar,” which would explain why Hulu turned it into one of its original series.

Likewise, Breathless, the 2020 novel from Jennifer Niven (All the Bright Places) is regularly removed from library circulation across much of Utah because this YA romance features a teenager about to enter college, who – unlike the teenagers of Utah – thinks about sex a lot!

It’s objectively funny that S.E. Hinton‘s The Outsiders, published in 1967, when the author was teenager herself – one of the most taught novels in schools across North America – has been challenged as recently as 2017 for featuring underage drinking and smoking, crass language, violence, and family dysfunction. (Don’t threaten us with a good time!) But we all know the real reason: the Socs out there were upset with how they were depicted.

Happy banned reading, friends!

Tundra Telegram: Books to Break Your Souls

Hello, and thanks for joining us at Tundra Telegram, the column where we listen in on topics that are currently running the (social media) world, and count down some books we think are irreplaceable.

You don’t need to be a member of the BeyHive to know that after nearly a decade of surprise drops and visual albums, Beyoncé’s seventh full-length album, Renaissance, was unveiled this past Friday. The immediate response has been overwhelmingly positive for this massive sixteen-track opus that manages to both honor Black musical artists throughout history and contain enough dance-floor bangers destined to instill a wild rumpus in the club. We thought we’d use it – or rather its title – to create this week’s reading list.

So, take that plastic off the sofa and get cozy. Don’t get heated, because we’re about to get all up in your mind and recommend some books for young readers – both about the European Renaissance (of the 15th and 16th centuries) and the later Harlem Renaissance (of the early 20th century) – that might impel you to move your self to the closest bookstore.

PICTURE BOOKS

Langston Hughes was an author who was also one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. That Is My Dream! is a picture book in which illustrator Daniel Miyares adapts his poem, “Dream Variation,” in which a young Black boy in confronted by the harsh reality of segregation and racism over this day, but he dreams of a different life – one full of freedom, hope, and so many possibilities!

Harlem’s Little Blackbird is a picture book biography by Renee Watson and Christian Robinson about Florence Mills, one of the most popular Black performers of the Jazz Age. The book tells her rise to fame on the stages of 1920s Broadway, and how she dedicated herself to supporting and promoting works by fellow Black performers – not unlike Beyoncé herself!

Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library by Carole Boston Weatherford and Eric Velasquez tells the story of an Afro-Puerto Rican law clerk who collected letters, music, and art from Africa and Black American creators. When his collection began to overtake his house, he brought it to the New York Public Library, where he created and curated a collection now known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, one of the greatest primary source repositories of the output of the Harlem Renaissance! The book is also available en español.

Bonnie Christensen lets Galileo Galilei tell his side of the story in I, Galileo. Galileo’s contributions to science and the Renaissance were numerous and his ideas world-changing, but in his own time he was branded a heretic and put under house arrest. This is a great kids’ introduction to possibly the most important scientist of the Renaissance!

Few artists had a bigger impact on the Renaissance than Michelangelo, and Stone Giant: Michelangelo’s David and How He Came to Be by Jane Sutcliffe and John Shelley, describes how the artist turned a neglected hunk of marble into one of the world’s most famous hunk sculptures.

And while Dr. Seuss’s Horse Museum, illustrated by Andrew Joyner, doesn’t focus only on the Renaissance (and, in fact, explores different methods and movements of visual art through depictions of horses), it does include Renaissance artist Raphael’s Saint George Fighting the Dragon, and the accompanying horse.

CHAPTER BOOKS & MIDDLE GRADE

To get started in this age range, it’s best to begin with What Was the Harlem Renaissance? by Sherrie L. Smith and Tim Foley to get some background. Young readers learn how the vibrant Black neighborhood in upper Manhattan became home to the leading Black writers, artists, and musicians of the 1920s and 1930s – including profiles of Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Augusta Savage, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Did someone say “Zora Neale Hurston”? The influential Black author of Their Eyes Were Watching God is the protagonist of the Zora and Me trilogy by Victoria Bond and T. R. Simon, which fictionalize the youth of Zora Neale Hurston, and look at systemic racism and the power of storytelling in a Black community in the American south at the turn of the century. They serve as coming-of-age tales and great introductions to Hurston as an author.

Though the Magic Treehouse siblings never travelled through time to the Harlem Renaissance (hmmm), Jack and Annie did go back to encounter the artist, inventor, and visionary, Leonardo Da Vinci in Magic Treehouse: Monday with a Mad Genius by Mary Pope Osborne and Sal Murdocca. And, as we know, Bey and Jay are fans of Leo’s work.

Need a little more Da Vinci? The graphic novel The History of Western Art in Comics, Part Two by Marion Augustin and Bruno Heitz begins in the Renaissance, and two kids and their grandpa continue their guided tour of art kicking off with such hits as The Last Supper, The Mona Lisa, and the Sistine Chapel. The book only covers up to Modern Art, so the Lemonade visual album doesn’t make an appearance.

And while historians disagree on if we should categorize ol’ William Shakespeare in the Renaissance, we’re going to include him here. Tales from Shakespeare is an excellent introduction for young readers to Shakespeare’s greatest plays, as siblings Charles and Mary Lamb vividly bring to life Hamlet, Othello, As You Like It, Pericles, and more, but modified and retold in a manner sensitive to the needs of young children, without resorting to any actual censoring. Makes sense, as many have argued Beyoncé is our Shakespeare.

YOUNG ADULT

Inspired by their class unit on the Harlem Renaissance, Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes (who was born in Harlem herself) follows the eighteen students of a Mr. Ward’s eleventh grade English class who begin having weekly poetry sharing sessions, revealing their most intimate thoughts about themselves and each another.

Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough takes readers to Rome in 1610 and introduces them to seventeen-year-old nun Artemisia Gentileschi, the real-life painter who also participated in one of the world’s first high-profile trials of sexual assault. The book looks both at the highs of creative inspiration and the devastating lows of a system rigged against women. (Technically, she was a Baroque painter, not a Renaissance painter, but are you here for book recommendations or art history lessons?)

The European Renaissance is usually associated with cities in what is now known as Italy, but several historical websites claim the reign of Henry VIII marked the real beginning of the Renaissance in England. So, we can also recommend Fatal Throne: The Wives of Henry VIII Tell All, a collaborative work by seven authors (M.T. Anderson, Candace Fleming, Stephanie Hemphill, Lisa Ann Sandell, Jennifer Donnelly, Linda Sue Park, and Deborah Hopkinson), each telling the story of one of the king’s six wives – and Henry himself, who liked it, and put a ring on it a full six times.

Now let’s get back to business.

Tundra Book Group