Looking for Alaska

 Looking for Alaska by John Green. (Dutton Books for Young Readers, 3 March 2005).

John Green's debut novel is the story of Miles Halter, who is fascinated by famous last words—and tired of his safe life at home. 

He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet Francois Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps.” 

Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young, who will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.

Awards and accolades include:

• Winner of the Michael L. Printz Award
• A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
• A New York Times Bestseller •
• A USA Today Bestseller
• NPR’s Top Ten Best-Ever Teen Novels 
• TIME magazine’s 100 Best Young Adult Novels of All Time
• A PBS Great American Read Selection

Looking for Alaska has been banned and challenged since its publication over 20 years ago.  Reasons include: depictions of “alternate sexualities” and “gender ideology” (despite the absence of  LGBTQIA+ characters); containing sexually explicit encounters in detail; bad language; and normalizing dishonesty, hazing, underage drinking, and smoking.

To see Unite Against Book Bans' Book Résumé for the book, click here.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

 The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.  (Simon Pulse, 30 September 2025).

Chbosky's debut novel  follows observant “wallflower” Charlie as he charts a course through the strange world between adolescence and adulthood. 

First dates, family drama, and new friends. 

Sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

Devastating loss, young love, and life on the fringes. 

Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it, Charlie must learn to navigate those wild and poignant roller-coaster days of growing up.

As well as being a NYT bestseller,  The Perks of Being a Wallflower received several accolades, including  

• ALA Best Book for Young Adults
• ALA Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults - Top Ten 
• ALA Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower has been challenged and banned since its original publication in 1999, for being sexually explicit, and having LGBTQIA+ content while mentioning rape, drugs and profanity.

To see the Intellectual Freedom Blog's spotlight on this book, click here.

The Hate U Give

 The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas.  (Clarion Books, 28 February 2017).

Angie Thomas' debut novel was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.  

It's the story of sixteen-year-old Starr Carter, who lives in two worlds: the poor neighbourhood where she was born and raised and her posh high school in the suburbs. 

The uneasy balance between them is shattered when Starr is the only witness to the fatal shooting of her unarmed best friend, Khalil, by a police officer. Now what Starr says could destroy her community. It could also get her killed. 

The Hate U Give won the William C. Morris Award, and was a Printz Honor book as well as a Coretta Scott King Honor Book.

The Hate U Give was banned and challenged for profanity, violence, and because it was thought to promote an anti-police message and indoctrination of a social agenda.

To see the Unite Against Book Bans book resume for The Hate U Give, click here.

George Takei

As well as being a multi-hyphenate (see below the photo), George Takei is the honorary chairman of ALA's Banned Books Week this year.

"Mr. Takei is recognized as an award-winning actor, outspoken civil rights activist, social media icon, and New York Times–bestselling author. He has leveraged his popularity as a star of the Star Trek franchise and a social media influencer to advocate for several causes, including the rights of Japanese Americans and LGBTQIA+ individuals." *

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinge, and Steven Scott.  Illustrated by Harmony Becker.

In 1942, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor,  ordered the "relocation" of every single person of Japanese descent in the country.  

This powerful graphic novel is George Takei's firsthand account of living for years in ramshackle dwellings under the watch of armed guards.  

This book has been banned repeatedly around the US, including Pennsylvania (in 2021, as part of a campaign against teaching about the racial history of America) and most recently in Tennessee. 

*Banned Books Week

October 5 - 11 is Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week was launched  by the American Library Association in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in libraries, bookstores, and schools. 

Held in the last week of September or first week of October, the annual event highlights the value of free and open access to information and brings together the entire book community — librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.*

Each day, for the remainder of the week, Stuff and Nonsense plans to highlight a book that has been challenged or banned.  

Stay tuned!

*bannedbooksweek.org/about

Funny Friday

 

- originally published September 3, 2024

Books I've loved that have been banned or challenged

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1999).

Speak has a been challenged most often because of what is considered to be explicit sexual content.  In 2010 an assistant professor of management (?) cautioned parents in a Missouri school district that it contained "soft-pornography" and "glorifies drinking, cursing, and premarital sex," as well as teaching principles contrary to the Bible.  Another reason, cited in 2021, was that the book is "biased against male students".

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (Turtleback Books, originally published 1999).

Since it was first published in 1999, The Perks of Being a Wallflower has been banned and challenged  by several school and libraries for “profanity and descriptions of drug abuse, sexually explicit conduct and torture”; "references to masturbation, homosexuality, and bestiality"; "drugs, alcohol, sex, homosexuality, and abuse"; and last  but not least, for its  “offensive content”.

 The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press, originally published 2008).

In 2016, The Hunger Games took the number five spot on the American Library Association most challenged books list. 

The reasons: “due to insensitivity, offensive language, violence, anti-family, anti-ethic and occult/satanic.” The novel was also banned for reasons of inserted religious perspective. However, throughout the trilogy, a religious stance is never once mentioned by Katniss or any other character. 

Looking for Alaska by John Green (Dutton Books, originally published 2005).

Looking for Alaska has been challenged for multiple strange reasons including "sexual content", "inappropriate language" and because it's "too racy to read".  One school challenged it because "there’s description of pornography, there’s smoking, and the book ends with a kind of question about a possible suicide".

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon (Doubleday, originally published 2003).

It has been removed from a summer reading list for "foul language".  It has also been removed from reading lists because it could “pollute young minds";  for "athesim"; "the profane use of God’s name,” and a “negative portrayal of a character with autism or a similar disorder".

Please welcome Jenn McKinlay!

Twenty years ago, The Catcher in the Rye was checked out to Candice Whitley, a teacher, on the day she was murdered. When the book is returned to the Briar Creek Public Library during its fine amnesty day, librarian and amateur sleuth Lindsey Norris can’t help but think it might be a clue to the cold case that has haunted the small coastal town for decades. And so starts Better Late Than Never, the seventh title in my Library Lover’s Mystery series.

Why The Catcher in the Rye? This has probably been the question I’ve been asked the most since I wrote the book. It’s a really good question. I wish I had a really good answer. But I don’t. Frankly, my relationship with the novel has been a love hate relationship over the years.

I first read Salinger’s story about Holden Caulfield when I was in high school. Full disclosure, I hated it. I thought Holden was a whiner and his ceaseless complaining about everyone being a phony grated on my nerves. Of course, in high school, I was heavily into genre fiction (that has never changed) so I wasn’t really enjoying any of the literature I was reading. Faulkner gave me fits!

Like a bad penny, Catcher showed up again in my college years. I hated it less as I was feeling rather anti-establishment myself and Holden’s angst and confusion, as I dipped my toe into adulthood, made more sense to me. He seemed to be able to read people with a clear-eyed gaze and was frequently disappointed in them and their lack. By that time, I had met a few disappointments myself. We were not friends but I felt less animosity towards the book. 

Then I began my library career. Reader’s advisory was my jam so I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. I was lucky enough to be the fiction selector for three years in my first library job in Cromwell, CT, so I read every issue of the New York Times Book Review, Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, etc., all in my quest for the best the fiction world had to offer. (Side note: some of these publications could be very harsh to authors and the fact that Publisher’s Weekly gave me a starred review for one of my first mysteries still makes me Snoopy dance). 

In addition to keeping up with the latest and greatest, I also encouraged my patrons to read the classics and as a librarian I became a big promoter of encouraging people to read banned books. Well, guess which book in the twentieth century is one of the most frequently challenged and banned? Yes, you got it – The Catcher in the Rye.

Why was it banned? Vulgar language, drinking, promiscuity, not fit for children, yada yada, the same old noise that is always made when something challenges preconceived notions of appropriateness. 

As I look at my own journey with the book, I realize it was not a novel I could appreciate as a teen but when I read it again before writing Better Late Than Never, I actually fell a little in love with the damaged Holden Caulfield. I had finally lived enough life, known pure joy and tremendous sorrow, to understand him and his desire to be “the catcher in the rye” the keeper of children’s innocence. So, that’s why I chose to use The Catcher in the Rye as the book that was checked out to the victim in Better Late Than Never.

Now the only question is, does the book help Lindsey solve the case of who murdered high school English teacher Candice Whitley?

Thanks for letting me visit!

Happy Reading,

Jenn

Jenn McKinlay is the New York Times 

bestselling author of the Cupcake Bakery Mysteries, 

the Hat Shop Mysteries, 

and the Library Lover’s Mysteries. 

As Josie Belle, she writes the Good Buy Girls Mysteries, 

and as Lucy Lawrence, she wrote the Decoupage Mysteries. 

She lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, with her family.*

*Biography from publisher's website

Teen Tuesday - Banned Books Week

In honor of Banned Books Week, I'm sharing a list of books about banned books.
(Click on titles to find available editions.)



Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (original publication date October 1953).

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.

Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.

The Year They Burned the Books by Nancy Garden (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999).

When Wilson High "Telegraph "editor Jamie Crawford writes an opinion piece in support of the newsex-ed curriculum, which includes making condoms available to high school students, she has no idea that a huge controversy is brewing. Lisa Buel, a school board member, is trying to get rid of the health program, which she considers morally flawed, from its textbooks to its recommendations for outside reading.

The newspaper staff find themselves in the center of the storm, and things are complicated by the fact that Jamie is in the process of coming to terms with being gay, and her best friend, Terry, also gay, has fallen in love with a boy whose parents are anti-homosexual. As Jamie's and Terry's sexual orientation becomes more obvious to other students, it looks as if the paper they're fighting to keep alive and honest is going to be taken away from them.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller (original publication date 1960).

In a nightmarish ruined world slowly awakening to the light after sleeping in darkness, the infant rediscoveries of science are secretly nourished by cloistered monks dedicated to the study and preservation of the relics and writings of the blessed Saint Isaac Leibowitz.

From here the story spans centuries of ignorance, violence, and barbarism, viewing through a sharp, satirical eye the relentless progression of a human race damned by its inherent humanness to recelebrate its grand foibles and repeat its grievous mistakes.

The Last Book in the Universe by Rodman Philbrick (Scholastic Books, 2002).

They call him Spaz, because his epilepsy prevents him from using mind probes that are rotting everyone else's minds. Which is why he still has a memory — something rare in the frightening world he lives in.

Civilization has been destroyed, except for the forbidden place called Eden, where a small group of people have discovered genetic improvement. Yet one old man, the one they call Ryter, has a lot of crazy and wonderful ideas. Nobody remembers books, but Ryter is writing one — even though he knows he may be punished by death.

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak (Knopf BFYR, 2006).

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.


Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

YA Thursday

Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers (St. Martin's Griffin trade paperback, 5 January 2010).

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog about young adult books that deal with sexual assault.  One of the books I discussed as Courtney Summers' All the Rage, about a high school girl who is raped at a party, but no one believes her when she tries to report it.

A few weeks ago, Some Girls Are, also by Summers, was in the news when it was removed from a South Carolina high school reading list after a parent complained.  

There will be spoilers in the following summary of the plot.

The book is about high school senior Regina Afton, who barely escapes being raped by her "best friend" Anna's boyfriend.  She tells another member of Anna's clique about it, and when she gets to school on Monday, find that Kara has spread rumors that she seduced the boy.  Almost everyone in the school immediately ostracizes Regina.

She is bullied mercilessly by Anna and her followers: Regina is pushed down the stairs, and somehow her locker is filled with rotting raw meat.

Regina admits that she has been guilty of bullying and rumor-mongering herself; that was how she got into Anna's clique to begin with.  And despite now being able to see what truly horrible people are in this group, Regina still longs to be part of it.  

When she finally realizes that she'll never be accepted again, Regina attempts revenge, using tactics that are just as cruel as those that were used against her.

Some Girls Are received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly.  It was a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults pick in 2011, a YALSA Top Ten Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, as well as a nominee for the Ontario Library Association's White Pine Award the same year.

The Charleston parent, who was reading the book along with her daughter, "got to page 74 – and a crude reference to oral sex – before she’d had enough. The next morning, she confiscated her daughter’s e-reader and called the school."*

After contacting the chairman of the school's English department and the district board, she filed a complaint with the district asking for a committee to review the book.  But before the committee could meet, the book was pulled from the curriculum and replaced by another, more innocuous title.  The parent also wrote a letter to the Post and Courier about the issue.

As a minister's daughter who was raised in a very strict household, I wasn't allowed to date or to go to school dances.  But I was allowed, and even encouraged, to read whatever I wanted to.  I  was also bullied in school, and the descriptions of bullying in Summers' novel rang true.  To me, Some Girls Are is more a story about bullying and its effects than anything else. 

Summers herself, in a Tumblr post, says 

The novel explores the consequences of hurting people and asks us to consider the impact our actions have on others. It’s about picking up the pieces of our mistakes and bettering ourselves. It’s about forgiveness.

And why wouldn't a parent want her child to read about that?

*Charleston Post and Courier, July 28, 2015


FTC Full Disclosure:  I borrowed this book from my local library.