I'm talking about Speak. Laurie Halse Anderson's debut novel is a total masterpiece. A girl enters ninth grade completely stripped of any sense of community and recovering from a trauma, and spends the book observing high school from a distance. She almost never speaks (which made the movie adaptation, which was very good, a tricky proposition). When I first read it, my reaction was almost to look over my shoulder- was this woman sitting behind me in high school? Did we attend the same school freshman year or something?
Recently, I caught a blog post on popular feminist blog Jezebel talking about Speak. "Yay!" was my first reaction, thinking they were just chatting about or reviewing the novel. Turns out the author of the post was Anderson herself, trying to get the word out about a fellow in Missouri who had written an op-ed in his local newspaper, saying that certain books in their local school's curriculum, including Speak, were offensive and ought to be removed. She was clearly upset and hoping to get some support from folks online.
Now, the ALA has a clear definition for what it means for a book to be "challenged" or "banned," and this doesn't meet it. But because I love the book, and because the author asked for people to blog about it, I'm doing that here.
Two things about this are particularly important to me: first, I said yesterday that all you need to be convinced of the value of young adult fiction (especially when it is about difficult, controversial, or scary things) is to hear from its readers. Well, Anderson has a video at the end of her post, of her reading a poem she put together out of lines from her fan letters. It's potent stuff, and brings me to my second point: that trying to protect teens from the dangers of fiction only stops them from reading about the real-life dangers they may have already suffered. Making sure no teen ever reads about rape (which is at the center of Speak) does not mean no teen ever experiences (or encounters the concept of) rape. Just ask your local middle or high school librarian what it feels like to offer a student a book about a subject they've asked for in a whisper. It's worth whatever fight it takes to keep good books available to young people.
-Anna, Kids Books
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I, too, was once a teenager. Reading a book that addressed the horrors of everyday life or traumatic experiences I or my friends had gone (or were going) through was one of the only things that kept me going. Just the idea that it wasn't just me was enough; the encouragement, the idea that one can triumph--that's just a bonus.
ReplyDeleteThese books are so important. Anyone who thinks young people shouldn't read them just because teens get abortions and have their "parts touched" doesn't know much about the children he thinks he's protecting. Many of them are having abortions and their parts have been touched. They're not doing it because of the books. These books are written because they're doing it.
Teens read these books to feel less alone in their experiences, to observe how another might deal with a similar situation, or to live through something they might be curious about without actually doing it.
How is that anything but beneficial, Mr. Scroggins?