Book Recommendation: Ban This Book

During September, we’re featuring book recommendations of banned or challenged books in honor of Banned Book Week, which takes place Oct. 1-7 this year.

Recommended by Dominic Frandrup, director at the Door County Library

I’m sure people have been hearing the news about book banning and proposed rating systems in the news recently, and I keep coming back to this 2018 title, and it still isn’t on any banned book list. It’s marketed to kids in grades four through six, but as an adult I really enjoyed this easy, insightful and laugh-out-loud read.

It all starts when fourth-grader, Amy, discovers that her favorite book is being challenged at her school library and taken off the shelf. When more and more books start disappearing, they try to find out why the adults are making such a fuss about them. Amy seems to be a natural librarian as she starts a small lending library out of her locker. She and her friends go to great, and hilarious, lengths in order to gather and surreptitiously read all the other titles that show up on the school board meeting agendas.

I saw a lot of myself and my friends at this age in this book as we had a similar response to the “Parental Advisory” labels that were being put on cassettes and CDs. We went so far as to use the PA labels as shopping guides back in the record store days. Pardon me, but I think I hear history repeating itself.