Talking With Rainbow Rowell About Censorship

When Rainbow Rowells first YA novelEleanor & Parkcame out this spring, people loved it. After John Green gave it a glowing (shimmering, really. Incandescent, even) review in the New York Times,even more people loved it. It was an Amazon Best Book of the Month, a New York Times bestseller, and it inspired a shocking amount of beautifully rendered fan art.I loved it, my mother loved it, my pregnant coworker loved it, my friend who never reads YA loved it. You probably loved it, too.(Full disclosure: Rainbow Rowell is a friend of mine. She once mailed me a photograph of Alan Alda and also a postcard with a drawing of an oyster on it that said The World Is Your Oyster after I quit my day job, so I would even go so far as to call her a good friend.)

A group of high school librarians in Minnesota loved Eleanor & Park so much that they chose it as their school districts summer read, giving all their high school students the option to read it and invited Rowell to come visit the Minneapolis-area schools and the local public library this fall.

But there are some who do not love it, not even a little bit, not even at all.

Two parents, with the support of the districts Parents Action League have convinced the Anoka-Hennepin school district, the county board, and the local library board to cancel her events next week calling Eleanor & Park a dangerously obscene book, demanding that it be removed from library shelves and asking that school librarians be disciplined for choosing it.

From theNational Coalition Against Censorship:

Until we got involved in the issue, Rainbow Rowell couldnt be 100% sure she had even been disinvited. The teachers and librarians had showed great enthusiasm at the outset, but as the date of her visit drew near, she was given mixed messages about her contract there and eventually came up against a communications freeze. A parent had lodged a challenge to profanity in the book and asked that the librarians who organized the talk to be punished. They riled up an action group (withexperiencein censorship) to organize against the author at the level of the County Board. The order came down. The talk was nixed and librarians were asked not to speak on the topic.

By mid-August, it looked as though the school visit would have to be cancelled Rowells literary agent received a note informing her of the official challenge but that it would still be possible for her to attend an event at the public library.

Then these concerned parents took the fight to the county board (Too hot for teens or taxpayer money, according to the Watchdog Minnesota Bureau), and that was the end of things. Right, as it happens, in the middle of Banned Books Week, which I found too delicious and infuriating to pass up, and begged Rainbow to let me talk to her about it. She begrudgingly agreed.

Rainbow! Hello! Thank you for changing your mind about this!

Mallory! Hi!

Go here to read the rest:
Talking With Rainbow Rowell About Censorship