American author Jodi Picoult remembers when everyone seemed to praise her novel Nineteen Minutes, a 2007 bestseller about a school shooting that now tops a list compiled by PEN America of the books most banned in U.S.-based schools.
“Not only was it recommended for young adults to read, but it was on the curriculum in schools where it’s now banned,” the author said during a recent telephone interview.
On Nov. 1, 2024, PEN issued a report that compiled more than 10,000 cases of books temporarily or permanently removed during the 2023-2024 academic year, roughly four times higher than for 2021-2022. The bans affected around 4,200 individual titles, compared with around 1,600 two years ago.
Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and American-Canadian author Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants are among the 20 books most frequently removed from U.S. schools, according to PEN.
The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a dark vision of the near future, in which a women’s only purpose is to breed. Water for Elephants tells the story of Jacob Jankowski, orphaned and penniless at the height of the Depression, who hops on a passing train and inadvertently runs away with the circus.
“If you’re a writer and everybody likes you, a) You’re doing something wrong, or b) You don’t exist,” Atwood wrote in an email to the Associated Press in 2019.
Margaret Atwood’s latest book has just been released in the U.S. to critical acclaim.
More than 80 per cent of the bans came in Iowa and Florida, states that have passed laws restricting school books. Around 4,500 were removed in Florida and more than 3,600 in Iowa, according to PEN.
“What students can read in schools provides the foundation for their lives, whether critical thinking, empathy across difference, personal well-being, or long-term success,” PEN’s director of its Freedom to Read program, Kasey Meehan, said in a statement. “The defence of the core principles of public education and the freedom to read, learn, and think is as necessary now as ever.”
Picoult noted that objections to her book centred on a single page referring to a date rape.
“There was nothing gratuitous about it. It’s not porn,” she said. “I think that some people are unhappy because it makes you look at the world in a different way. That’s what’s behind a lot of the bans.”
With files from CBC Books