Class Act (CBR15 #26)

My last Cannonball Read Banned Graphic Novels book review. 🙂

Class Act reminded me of The Hate U Give, in that we have a protagonist who is attending a predominantly white, privileged classmates. Our main characters are Drew and Jordan (Jordan was the focus on Craft’s previous book in this universe, New Kid) as they deal with being scholarship student eighth graders at Riverdale Academy.  

But what’s this story about, you ask? From Goodreads: “Eighth grader Drew Ellis is no stranger to the saying “You have to work twice as hard to be just as good.” His grandmother has reminded him his entire life. But what if he works ten times as hard and still isn’t afforded the same opportunities that his privileged classmates at the Riverdale Academy Day School take for granted? To make matters worse, Drew begins to feel as if his good friend Liam might be one of those privileged kids. He wants to pretend like everything is fine, but it’s hard not to withdraw, and even their mutual friend Jordan doesn’t know how to keep the group together. As the pressures mount, will Drew find a way to bridge the divide so he and his friends can truly accept each other? And most important, will he finally be able to accept himself?” 

While you do not need to read New Kid to read Class Act (I didn’t) it would have been helpful in getting the lay of the land at Riverdale and the various friendships the for the core of the book. This one is a 3.5 rounded up for me. There were some pacing issues in the middle. But Jerry Craft adds a lovely layer of specificity in the neighborhood, pulling from his personal history in Harlem and Washington Heights. The sections showing Jordan’s original comics also did a nice job of letting the reader into the mind of our protagonist and helping to spell out some things for the younger readers.  

Gender Queer (CBR15 #24)

I haven’t often re-read books in the past decade. But sometimes I revisit an old favorite, or earlier books in a series before continuing with the newly published. Due to my personal commitment to reading banned and challenged books it has also meant that our Banned Book Week book clubs at Cannonball Read have included re-reads. I try to review the re-reads on their own merits – what was the reading experience this time. But in the case of Gender Queer my experience is so tinged with watching a book I loved when I first read it in 2019 turn into the most challenged book of the past two years, that I never really left this book. I’ve been thinking about it, and suggesting it, and following its author for the past four years.  

Both times I took a copy out of the library. I smiled when I spotted the cover of the copy I borrowed this time – the Stonewell Honor sticker prominently placed on the blue background instead of the golden yellow I had last time. Settling in this time I still found Kobabe’s deeply introspective journey illuminating and relatable, if from a different angle. I was reminded how brave Kobabe had been in sharing what eir body dysmorphia is like and how it had empowered me to speak up for myself more when I was physically uncomfortable.  It is also still visually my Goldilocks’ porridge of graphic novels – it was just right for me. Kobabe’s style is beautifully vibrant without being overwhelming. Kobabe achieves such balance in eir work that I was able to slip into the work and devour it in one sitting, which is still a rarity for me.  Read this book, won’t you?

This One Summer (CBR15 #23)

https://www.jilliantamaki.com/thisonesummer

This One Summer is a re-read for me. It is also the book I have read in the past few years specifically from the Banned Book List put out by the ALA that makes me scratch my head the most. It is because this is the book that hit #1 most challenged in 2016 and was why I read it in 2017. It then came back to the top ten in 2018. It did not make sense to me then, and it makes little sense to me now.  

Not that challenging and banning books makes a lot of sense to me anyway, but sometimes it is easier to follow the logic people are deploying. It was banned and challenged because it includes LGBTQIA+ characters, drug use and profanity, and it was considered sexually explicit with mature themes.  

This book is what it says on the tin: the story of one summer with two preteen girls, Rose and Windy, as they navigate their understandings of the world and relationships around them. They are on the edge of the next phase, constantly peeking over the barrier and trying to understand what they are seeing and hearing. The Tamakis (cousins Mariko and Jillian) capture the mood of this time in our lives beautifully, showing the reader using the art but also obfuscating slightly in the text.  

Whether this book has themes to mature for its audience depends on the audience. I have seen it listed as intended for readers twelve and over and that makes sense. That’s the age of the characters. Children at that age, and those right around it, are experiencing the things that this book tackles. There is some profanity, especially dealing with the older teen characters, there is also a teen pregnancy and the burgeoning questions of sex and sexuality that the tweens experience. 

Literary prizes have their merits and their detractors, but I think it is interesting to highlight that This One Summer was the first graphic novel to receive the Caldecott Honor for “Most Distinguished American Picture Book for Children” and the Printz Honor for “Excellence in Literature for Young Adults” in 2015.

The Hate U Give (CBR14 #53 reread)

Another review of a Cannon Book Club choice, 2017’s The Hate U Give. A peek behind the scenes: this one almost got left off the voting, having been popular over the years but as it’s the 30^th most challenged book of the decade 2010-2019 and the fifth most challenged in 2021 the argument to include it felt justified. This YA novel was challenged and banned in school libraries and curriculums because it was considered “pervasively vulgar” and because of drug use, profanity, and offensive language. Other reasons given over the years include violence, it was thought to promote an anti-police message, and indoctrination of a social agenda. I have thoughts about those that I’ll be holding on to until we book club September 16-17.

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.

Starr is an engaging narrator who straddles different worlds and in unpacking the kind of code-switching life Starr leads, Thomas creates a sympathetic and complex protagonist. The pacing this go through wasn’t great for me, the jump aheads in time took a long time to start and then once they did they were a bit abrupt (but that could also be impacted by my choice to listen to this read via audiobook).

In my review four years ago, I wrote at length about Angie Thomas’s authorial intent where she pulls at the strings of how indoctrinated our society is with the idea that “bad” kids who are acting like “thugs” somehow don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt while the “good” guys who are using “necessary force” must be presumed to be acting correctly. Thomas rightly calls bullshit on that notion as she tears apart that idea by introducing us to Starr, and Khalil, and Seven, and Kenya, and Devante, and all the other characters living in Garden Heights.

All Boys Aren’t Blue (CBR14 #47)

When we had our book club vote for September, I was secretly hoping that All Boys Aren’t Blue would be one of the ones we chose. I was flabbergasted that in November of last year the memoir had a criminal report filed with the Flagler County Sheriff’s office by a member of the Flagler County School Board arguing that the book’s inclusion in three district school libraries violated state obscenity laws because it contained sexually graphic material. It has also been removed from school libraries in at least eight states and is ALA’s third most challenged book of 2021. All because the author wanted to see stories like theirs on the shelves so that children like them would feel less alone. Because queer, Black stories from the Black perspective are largely missing from the pop culture landscape.

I loved this book. George M. Johnson writes so beautifully and openly about his life that you are brought into his understanding of the two big identities that intersect in his life, his queerness and his Blackness. I don’t live too far from where Johnson grew up so there was that added layer for me, but what Johnson sets out to achieve for the younger audience he also achieved with me.

I’m not the only one who liked this work and found value in it, Johnson’s reflections on growing up Black and queer was optioned by Gabrielle Union-Wade’s production company for a television series. I’m with Johnson, books with heavy topics are not going to harm children and young adults. They live in the world which is full of heavy topics (think back to your own growing up years), and are going to be affected by them.  Books like this one give them (and us) the tools, the language, the resources and the education to deal with some of the tough things that will come their way.

banned book thoughts

Banning books works.

Unfortunately.

On a number of levels.

It keeps books out of the hands of the people immediately effected by the ban.

It emboldens the challengers to go after more. To look beyond the books themselves to take further action against the represented groups.

I would like to say that the benefits of exposure to the challenged titles outweighs the damage, but I can’t. Because media attention is short-lived and successful challenges can lead to bans that left unchecked can keep those books off publicly accessible shelves for years or decades.

It is a tool of power. Power and control. In both the short and long term.

Worse yet, the ban doesn’t even have to hold, or exist for long. Merely being challenged will often pull a book out of circulation due to fear of dealing with the fallout of shelving these ‘bad’ books. Libraries in the United States are, by and large, publicly funded institutions which means that the money that puts books on shelves at all can come under fire if public opinion isn’t good. Quietly across the country boards and directors are making the choice to pre-emptively pull books off shelves, effectively silencing the authors and leaving the readers who need these books out in the cold.

A lot of the rhetoric flying around right now (February 2022) is full of people with good intentions doing feel good actions that provide no real redress to the actual problem. And that’s shitty, because they are acting in selfish ways instead of in selfless action. And as usual, its people who look like me doing the shitty thing on both sides.

I read banned books as a student, not because I knew to look for them, or that they were available to me, but because I had adults putting those options in front of me, occasionally at their own peril, and parents who were supportive of my reading and education broadly.

I read banned and challenged books as an adult because the idea that someone feels they have the right to decide what is acceptable to read, makes my skin crawl.

Some of the most beautiful reading experiences I have had are with banned books… because often banned and challenged books are telling deeply personal stories of the vagaries of this life that we are given. The idea that anyone ‘needs to be protected’ from truth is so rage inducing that I often cannot put it into words, even while actively seeking to read and review banned and challenged books all the time, even while planning to lead a book club about banned books this September.

Because why are books being banned or challenged right now?

Ostensibly the major complaints come down to whether a book is appropriate for its audience. Your mileage may vary on that on its face value. What it is really being used for is to keep books that don’t fit into someone’s view of what “children” or better yet “their children” should be exposed to. Because we don’t talk about those things.

Things like racism or racial conflict.

Or war.

Or genocide.

Or violence.

Or gender identity.

Or queer love.

Or what constitutes blasphemy.

But the world has all these things. Some in greater proportion to others, but they are all true.

And objective truth is more important than comfort, is more important than the propagandist forces that would tell you to be afraid of it. That are after accumulating power based on what they can make you afraid of, of whom they can paint as the villain making your life worse.

Because the thing to fear is living in the dark. Of not knowing truth and believing lies. Of creating boogeymen where none exist.

Because lies are the tools of the oppressors.

And people are just people, beautiful and complex, and fascinating.

Fight back. Don’t be afraid.

The Lottery (CBR11 #51)

In a bit of bingo logistics, I decided a couple short stories might be in order to fill in as many remaining squares as I could. With that in mind I went down the list of things I’ve been meaning to read anyway and came across “The Lottery”by Shirley Jackson which has quite the history of making people question its place in front of readers at all.

What I didn’t know was just how short it really is – its only 3,773 words long! But, as I sat reading the story that has been credited with spawning so many other works of short horror I tried to put myself in the mind’s eye of someone who was picking up The New Yorker in June 1948, the sneaking feeling that something wasn’t quite right, and finally the shock and distaste as the details suddenly come together in the mind’s eye.  While I can’t say that this is a great literary work of any length, I can see why its pacing and content crossed with setting unsettled so many readers and eventually led it to gain infamy for being routinely banned by public schools.

Famously this short story came together for Jackson in one afternoon and was immediately picked up by The New Yorker and published three weeks later. I can see where this work was quickly written and published, its characters are flat and the plot is very sparse. It functions at its best as a snapshot of a slightly skewed parallel world asking us to think about how we might be viewed from the outside. What terrible things have become mundane in our own lives? But I promise you that you will never care less about the description of a plain black box.

My favorite bit of Jackson trivia surrounding the reception and banning attempts of the short story are about its banning in apartheid era South Africa. Jackson is said to have commented that at least they understood the story was not saying nice things about blindly following tradition, and that wasn’t good for the powers that were.

This One Summer (CBR9 #53)

Each year, I try to read a frequently challenged or banned book during Banned Books Week (September 24-30). I have very particular feelings about the concept of banning or suppressing works of fiction because they do not fit into a particular worldview (I’m staunchly against it). Do I think every book should have an audience and be read? Probably not. However, I do believe in our ability to choose for ourselves what we should read, and that banning or challenging books which only serve to widen our understanding of the world and people around us is shameful.

For the life of me, I’m not sure why this was the most challenged book last year. Yes, it has some sexual content (a character becomes pregnant and 16, and another character is not handling it well), and there is some foul language (usually in reference to said pregnancy) but otherwise this incredibly detailed and beautiful book is exactly in line with the wide variety of YA that lines bookstore and library shelves.

To the book itself: This graphic novel, a Printz and Caldecott winner, is at its heart a short story about two early teen girls whose families both visit Awago Beach, Ontario each summer. The girls are roughly 18 months apart, but share the kind of friendship born of many hours spent together in a vacuum.  Rose is an only child whose parents seem rather ordinary. Windy is an adopted only child who goes to the beach with her mother and grandmother who are definitely on the “hippie” end of the spectrum. It is a “coming of age” story where these preteens/early teens are figuring out how to be more mature and what it means to leave the trappings of childhood behind.

I found the dynamic of these two different only children and the varieties of their familial interactions to be the most interesting part of the narrative. I also am in love with the art in this book. Jillian Tamaki is a flat out genius and her duo chromatic work (purples and blacks) leaves you with the uneasy feeling of a healing bruise, while also perfectly capturing the aesthetic of a large lake.

I really enjoyed this quick read, and hope you will as well.

Beyond Magenta (CBR8 #66)

Over the past few years I have begun to pay attention to reading books by or about members of the LGBTQ community. In general, I’ve tried to be more aware of my reading habits and expand them generally. It was a boon to me then that one of the tasks for Read Harder challenge was read a book by or about a person who identifies as transgender. I shortlisted three, but decided to go with Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin as it is also on the ALA’s top ten most challenged books of 2015 list.

When scanning the list of frequently challenged books several themes present themselves, and boil down to several ideas for me. One of them is that people are afraid of exposing children to values that they deem to be sinful or wrong, so of course many of the books that are challenged are focused around offensive language, sexuality, homosexuality, and the like. The list of reasons submitted for Beyond Magenta’s challenges include: being anti-family, offensive language, homosexuality, sex education, political viewpoint, religious viewpoint, unsuited for age group, and other (“wants to remove from collection to ward off complaints”). I wish I could say I was surprised.

If I may pull out my soap box for just a minute, by refusing to consider conversations about any of the items above you are only going to Other the group, and that never ends well. I digress.

On its merits Beyond Magenta is a three-star book for me. Kuklin made the choice when working with the teens featured in this book to record conversations and then working with each teen to craft them into essays told from their point of view, with some insights from Kuklin presented in a different text within each essay. While I applaud the decision to place the story into the hands of its owners, and not try to translate it through her own cisgender and heterosexual view of the world it unfortunately left the book a little unpolished. It also hurt the book to pretend that these responses weren’t crafted from interview questions when the author tells us as much in the afterword.

But the biggest problem I had with the book was simply this: it was a book written for other cisgendered readers which focuses heavily on the bodies, hormones, and battles for acceptance (which is a teenage obstacle no matter the gender identity). It does not however focus on the emotional growth of coming to terms with their trans identity, or any of the many other facets of the lives of the interviewees. Perhaps Kuklin’s scope, focusing on teens (although at least a few of her interviewees were by the end in their early 20s) hampered her in this regard, but unfortunately there were many times when I felt that the soap opera people assume transgender teens are having was spotlighted a bit too much.

Still, there are also positives: perhaps most importantly this book shows a diversity of transgender teens. Of the six There is an equal representation of two transgender women, two transgender men, and two gender non-conforming teens. Likewise, at least half of the interviewees are people of color, and all six come from a variety of socioeconomic and familial backgrounds.

I would suggest this book perhaps as a very introductory book, but I think Transparent which I read and reviewed last year is a better place to start.