Each day during this year's Banned Book Week, I will be highlighting a book that has been challenged within the last couple of years. Today's book:
Geography Club by Brent Hartinger (HarperTempest). Challenged at the West Bend, Wis., Community Memorial Library (2009) as being "obscene or child pornography" in a section designated "Young Adults." The library board unanimously voted 9–0 to maintain, "without removing, relocating, labeling, or otherwise restricting access," the books in the young adult category at the West Bend Community Memorial Library. The vote was a rejection of a four-month campaign conducted by the citizen’s group West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries to move fiction and nonfiction books with sexually explicit passages from the young adult section to the adult section and label them as containing sexual material. I've read this book, and frankly, I can't see what the fuss is about. It's the story of a group of gay high school students finding each other and coming together just to have someone else to talk to about their experiences. Yes, two gay students kiss, and there is some frank and honest language that is exactly how students talk. But obscene? Child pornography?? Not even close!
2 comments:
Remember, Little Sister, that there are those folks who find ANYTHING with even a whisper of homosexuality to be "obscene."
It's Eric's post, but I agree with his point, and see yours as well. The book has nothing obscene in it unless the mere notion of homosexuality is obscene.
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