Here's a link to the article in the local paper. The Beat reports this happened in a school library in Salisbury, Maryland. What is it with the Mid-Atlantic states lately? Maryland now, Connecticut a year or so ago. Is there a push to get another coastline for Alabama or something???*
(*reference to Corville's humorous claim that Pennsylvania is nothing but Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in between)
5 comments:
It's worth noting that the parents who complained were parents of elementary school children. So, I'm willing to have a little sympathy towards a decision to remove the book from an elementary school library. Maybe the district will place it in a middle school library, playing the "it was innappropriate for younger audiences but we don't want to be a censor be limiting access to older readers" card. Or maybe not.
This sounds like another case of librarians naively putting a comic on a kids' shelf simply because it's a comic. I gotta say, this stuff really ticks me off. If you're going to be a librarian, and you aren't going to look into a book yourself before shelving it, at least do some research about where you should put it!
Meanwhile, books like Harry Potter get this kind of attention straight away--Books 1-3 are often in the children's section while the last 4 get shelved with other Young Adult books. And it's comics' reputation that suffers here! Arg! Sorry. This is a topic I've gotten behind before, and it's bothersome it's still going on :-/
Hard to disagree with you on this one, Ben. And just becuase something has/had a cartoon version on the Cartoon Network doesn;t mean it was/is for kiddies, eh?
UPDATE: The series has been removed from ALL public libraries in the district. See http://www.wboc.com/Global/story.asp?S=11321353
A bit of an over-reaction, I think.
What I always have a hard time understanding is decisions like these get made by the minority. The article mentioned one letter of complaint. Combined with the family whose son brought the book home, that makes two?! And yet it always seems tons of people come out against these kinds of decisions!
Rant over--I'm sure there were more complaints, and the ones objecting probably represent a much smaller group than it appears, but still :-/
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