Ban This Book: List 1

Mrs. Jones sighed and wrung her hands. She looked like she was about to tell me my dogs had died.

“It means I can’t check it out to you, honey, or to anybody else. Not until I talk to the school board and get this nonsense overturned.

“It means, Amy Anne, that your favorite book was banned from the school library.”

“I know, honey. I agree. Nobody but your parents has the right to tell you what books you can and can’t read. I promise you, I’m going to fight this. But in the meantime I have to abide by what the school board decides, or I could lose my job.”

Inside that house right now were Thing 1 and Thing 2, my two annoying little sisters. I closed my eyes and shuddered at the thought of having to spend one more minute with them.

In From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Claudia and her little brother Jamie run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and hide out every night in the bathrooms so the security guards don’t find them.

I got out and stood by the car, reluctant to go inside.

“How was chess club?” Dad asked me, and I cringed a little.

She was a pudgy five-year-old with Mom’s dimples, Dad’s darker skin, and her hair pulled back into a fuzzy ponytail on the back of her head.

“Why am I supposed to do something with them? I’m not the one crawling around on the floor getting them all riled up!” That’s what I wanted to say, but of course I didn’t.

Alexis’s clothes were all over the floor of the bedroom—even on my side of the room—and she was holding onto the corner of my bed to practice arabesques in her pink tutu.

“My books!” I said. The few books I owned were all propped up against each other in a half circle outside her “barn,” the spines twisting out of shape. I started to snatch them up, and Angelina wailed.

“I don’t suppose you guys have found a magical rabbit hole I can fall down or dug up an enchanted amulet in the backyard that leads to another world, have you?”

And right at the front of the aisle was a podium with a microphone on it. The microphone I was supposed to get up and talk into.

“Oh, honey, I’m so glad you came tonight,” she said. “Amy Anne’s our own honorary librarian,” she told Dad. “I think she spends more time in the library than I do.”

Dad followed her gaze to a petite, pretty white woman with short blond hair. She wore a matching lavender skirt and jacket.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Mrs. Jones said, “every parent has the right to decide what their child can and can’t read. What they cannot do is make that decision for everyone else. I respectfully ask that the school board overturn the arbitrary, closed-door decision to remove these books, and to require any parent still concerned about library materials to follow the established reconsideration policy set up by this board. Thank you.”

"...Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think school should be a place where a parent’s authority is undermined. I think it should be a place where it’s reinforced.”

“Mrs. Jones never used the word censorship, but it was there behind everything she said,” Mrs. Spencer said.

I have only asked to remove those books that are inappropriate or have no redeeming value.