In Which It Is Banned Books Week Again

I've posted before (here, here, and here if you want to read) about book bannings and #BannedBooksWeek, but unfortunately the topic is perennial and needs to continue being addressed. Books bannings have continued to increase over the past year. The continued increase in books featuring BIPOC and queer characters seems to really scare certain groups of conservative parents, and those groups know how to organize and how to make a lot of noise.

I have to say I'm a bit disappointed in some of the lists I've seen put out this week featuring banned books. A lot of them are classics (such as Lord of the Flies or To Kill a Mockingbird) or older children's books that were the subject of bans in the past but are overall really well known (such as Harry Potter).

The real danger right now is the hundreds of books that are being quietly removed from classrooms and school libraries because parent groups are challenging them. These groups assert that the very fact that a book stars a BIPOC child and mentions racism means it promotes Critical Race Theory and, even more often, that the very fact that a book features a queer character makes it "pornography". There are picture books being challenged as being "pornographic". Think about that for a minute. 

Unfortunately this phenomenon isn't limited to schools either. A small town in Michigan lost funding for its library in a vote this summer after a conservative group raised concerns that the librarians were "groomers" pushing "pornography" on children. Which is not in any way, shape or form what children's librarians who have books with queer characters in their collections are doing. I've heard anecdotes of Pride month displays in libraries all over the country being tampered with, everything from patrons checking out every single book to keep them out of the hands of children to outright vandalism.

A swift perusal of my shelves and my daughter's shelves produced a pile of middle grade books that I know have been challenged and removed from classrooms and/or libraries along with books I don't know for sure have been challenged but are likely to encounter challenges for the reasons cited above. If I looked for longer I could likely find even more books that commit the apparently grave crime of making children aware that racism still happens and queer people exist.

So, what can you do if you want books like this to get into the hands of readers? On a larger scale, if you know books bans are happening in your community, make your voice known. If your community and/or local school library is open to having the kinds of books that are being banned in its collection, request that they purchase books like this if they have funds to do so. If the library doesn't have the funds and you do, consider donating such books to your local school and/or community library, or to your child's classroom library or the classroom library of a teacher in your circle.

If you're a parent, godparent, aunt or uncle, or otherwise have a role in a child's life that involves buying gifts for them, give them books that have been challenged. There are books with queer and/or BIPOC kids in every genre and you can certainly find a book the child in your life will enjoy. Whether the child in your life will see themself in these books or whether they'll see that kids who are different from them can be heroes it's equally important for them to read these books.

I have a lot of hope that the generation nearing and just entering adulthood is going to bring about a sea change in the way our society sees and treats queer people and people of color. I'm not an idiot. I know there will also be pushback and challenges, but the young people I know give me a lot of hope that we're moving in the right direction and the larger part of their generation will be on the right side of history.

In Which I Gush About Some Queer Middle Grade Books

Before LGBTQIA+ Pride Month ends, I need to get to the post I've been meaning to write recommending some queer MG I've read this summer. First, these books I'm recommending are far from the only ones out there. There's more and more queer kidlit making its way into the world, which is a very good thing. It's a good thing for the queer kids, who are finally able to see themselves in books. It's a good thing for the kids working through their identity to see characters with similar questions. It's also a good thing for cishet kids to see queer kids in the books they read. Both so they understand the struggles those kids can go through and so they see the struggles and joys that are common to all of us, regardless of our sexual and gender identities. Especially in today's climate, when states are passing laws stopping trans kids from getting gender affirming care and/or preventing teachers from talking about LGBTQIA+ people in the classroom, we need to get these books into the hands of kids.  I believe it's my kids' generation that's going to turn the tide and make real progress to stop that toxic heteronormativity of western culture. I still sometimes struggle with "they" as a singular pronoun (even though it's been used in English for hundreds of years to refer to a person whose gender is unknown), but it slips off my kids' tongues naturally. They found out my cousin was gay and marrying another man and they were like, "Hope they have a great marriage." A teen at our church came out as nonbinary, started using they/them pronouns, and changed their preferred name, and my kids along with all the kids in the youth group just rolled with it, even though our church is on the conservative end of the UMC spectrum.

First up in my rundown is Michael Leali's lovely contemporary debut, The Civil War of Amos Abernathy. The writing and narrative style themselves are worthy of note. MC Amos' voice is classic middle grade and a treasure trove for a writer wanting to learn how to master voice. The novel is written alternating Amos' letters to a Civil War soldier who would likely have identified as a trans man if he had lived today with a present tense narrative covering one important day. The narrative combined with the letters slowly reveal what's happening and how important it is for Amos and his community. Amos has spent most of his life volunteering at a living history park of which his mom is the director. He has been out as a gay boy since elementary school, and he suddenly realizes in seventh grade that there are no queer people portrayed at the LHP. Along with his best friend and a new friend on whom he's developed a crush, he goes searching for queer people in the 19th century, including one I won't name who will likely surprise you. Amos' new friend and crush is from a conservative Christian family and he struggles with his feelings for Amos because he's been told his whole life that they're wrong. One thing I especially love about this book as a queer identifying and LGBTQIA+ affirming Christian myself is that Amos' family are also faithful churchgoers. They just attend a different, open and affirming church. So often religious characters in queer novels are painted exclusively as bigots, or at best as people who are reluctantly accepting but not happy about it. While that is absolutely the case for a portion of people of faith, that doesn't describe anywhere near all of us and I was glad to see both sides shown in this novel.

In the Key of Us by Miriam J. Lockington gives us two queer Black girls experiencing first love at a prestigious music summer camp. I know from twitter interactions with the author that the camp was inspired by a camp that my brother attended for many years and, based on what I know of it from him, the portrayal of the environment at a camp like that was pretty spot on. In addition to giving us a sweet first love story between two girls, this books addresses what it's like to be a BIPOC in a heavily white environment. It also tackles issues of grief, guilt, self-harm, and family pressure. Told in dual POV, this book and is thoughtful and tackles important issues without feeling like a heavy "issue book".

The Mirrorwood by Deva Fagan is a secondary world fantasy loosely inspired by the story of Sleeping Beauty. While the MC, Fable, is cishet, I believe it deserves a mention in a rundown of queer kidlit because the world Fagan has created is queernormative. Fable has a nonbinary sibling who uses they/them pronouns and this is not in any way remarkable. Families with two dads and two moms are mentioned in the villages Fable visits as a matter of course. In the world created for this book, being queer is just a part of some people's identity. There's no indication that they encounter prejudice or pushback of any kind. Both queer kids and cishet kids (and adults!) can benefit from seeing a world like this.

If forced to name the queer MG book I read this summer that's the most important, it would have to be David Levithan's Answers in the Pages. It's a short little book (I read it in one afternoon) following a boy whose mom starts a campaign to have a book his teacher (who is gay) assigns based on one sentence at the end about the two boys in the book loving each other. The MC's story is interspersed with chapters from the (made up) book showing just how incredibly innocuous and age appropriate the book is. A third narrative, which seems to sit apart from the other two until they all dovetail at the end, follows two junior high boys whose friendship is growing into a mutual crush, and who aren't sure how to handle their feelings for each other. This book resonated with me as a parent because, when my 17yo was in elementary school, my reaction to a book with two boys who might be in love with each other would have been closer to the MC's mom's reaction than I would like to admit to myself. I don't think I would have moved to have such a book removed from the classroom, but I would have been uncomfortable with it and would have at least thought internally along the lines of the argument his mom gives. She's not portrayed as a bigot who hates all gay people. She just has an idea that kids don't need to think about their sexuality until at least high school and for that reason it will just confuse them to have gay people mentioned in books they read in elementary school. That's a pretty common view for Gen Xers and millenials who are the parents of kids in school right now. We were never exposed to gay characters in books until high school at the very earliest and it can feel weird to us for our kids to read the books available now. Yes, some of the people (maybe even most of the people) moving to ban books really are hateful bigots. Others are like the MC's mom, people who have a generational misunderstanding of what kids can "handle" in the books they read, and whose minds can be changed (as this mom's mind is) when they stop to really listen to the other side.

I hope you'll pick up some of these books if you haven't read them and consider passing them on to the children in your life. If you have other great queer kidlit recs, I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

In Which I Recommend Some Books With LGBTQIA+ Representation

Now that I my kids are on summer break, I've found I have significantly less time to do anything other than hang out with my ten year old. Add in polishing up ANNA OTTO IS NOT A HORSE GIRL, which I've just started querying, and slowly working on my #WIP, and that doesn't leave much time for blogging. I have a little time right now, though, and I don't want Pride Month to end without giving some recommendations for middle grade books with queer rep.

Pictured above are three middle grade books I own and love with three different types of queer rep. The queer community is really diverse, and I'm glad to see a growing number of books in the middle grade market that shows that diversity. Queer rep is about more than girls having crushes on girls or boys having crushes on boys, though that's absolutely something that should be present in middle grade books.

Cattywampus is a dual POV book starring two twelve year old witches. Catybird looks like and identifies as a girl, but she is intersex and has XY chromosomes. She's afraid that because she's "not a real girl", her magical powers, which pass from mother to daughter in her family, will never work right. Some people might wonder why we need intersex rep in books because it's so rare. I learned recently that intersex people make up 2% of the population, which is the same percentage as the number of natural redheads. No one says natural redheads are so rare they don't need to see themselves in books. An important but non POV character in Cattywampus has two moms, so Ash managed to work in a little bit more queer rep, which is great.

The Sal and Gabi duology by Carlos Hernandez is part of Rick Riordan presents line. These are books written by BIPOC creators and about BIPOC kids featuring the writers' culture, folktales, myths, etc. Sal and Gabi is unusual for the line in that it's more science fiction than fantasy, but it's infused with Hernandez's Cuban American culture. It's not a part of the main storyline, but the MC, Sal Vidon, is aromantic and asexual. He's at an age when many kids are having their first crushes and even starting to date, and Sal makes it clear that crushes and dating are not part of who he is. I love how it's woven naturally into the story and doesn't feel forced.

The third book pictured is the second in the Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series, by superstar "storyteller of the gods" Rick Riordan. One of the important secondary characters is Alex Fierro, who is genderfluid. Alex most often identifies as a girl and uses female pronouns but sometimes identifies as a boy and uses male pronouns. Alex and MC Magnus even have a conversation about what it means to Alex to be genderfluid and how it's different from someone who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns. This storyline fits perfectly into the Norse mythology that the series is based on. Alex is the child of Loki who, in the myths, was usually male but was sometimes female. Usually if Loki has a demigod child he is the child's father. In Alex's case he appeared as a woman and tempted Alex's father. There's some good queer rep in Riordan's Heroes of Olympus and Trials of Apollo books as well.

Of course these three books aren't the only queer MG books out there. They're just three that I love enough to own copies of. A few more I've read this year are Kacen Callender's King and the Dragonflies, which features a middle school boy coming to terms with his older brother's death and his own sexuality, The Only Black Girls in Town by Brandy Colbert which stars a girl with two dads, and The List of Things That Will Not Change by Rebecca Stead, which tells the story of the MC's dad getting married to another man. The third book in the Love, Sugar, Magic series by Anna Meriano deserves an honorable mention for its portrayal of two boys who might, or might not, have a crush on each other. At this age a lot of kids are figuring out their feelings of attraction, and I love that this was worked naturally into the story. Finally, another honorable mention is Sarah Kapit's Get a Grip, Vivy Cohen, which features an important subplot with Vivy's brother realizing he's gay and starting to date another boy. There are other books that casually mention a character having two aunts or two uncles who aren't featured in the book or a kid at school who has two moms or two dads. This has become common enough that I don't even have a specific list of books with this in mind.

I don't feel like I'm qualified to write a main character who is genderqueer or attracted to the same gender or multiple genders because that's not my experience, though I may try it with an important secondary child character someday. When I wrote my first MG book sixteen years ago, queer rep wasn't even on my radar. That book will probably never see the light of day, not unless I rewrite the whole thing. I may work some casual queer rep into it, but it wouldn't be the focus of the story. The second manuscript I finished, which, after six months on the shelf and then a massive rewrite, became ANNA OTTO IS NOT A HORSE GIRL features an important secondary character with two moms. They're only on page once and only mentioned a handful of times, but I specifically put them in because I wanted kids with two moms or two dad to feel seen. My WIP has more queer rep, though it's mostly in the adult characters. Two women who will be important mentors to the MC are married to each other. I'm still working out the details, but the book will also have asexual rep, which I can write from my own experience as a woman on the asexual spectrum. Someday I'd like to write an asexual MC, but, since I didn't realize I was on the asexual spectrum until I was in my 40's, it's more difficult for me to imagine writing a young adolescent who is actually aware of their asexual identity. 

Whether you, your child, or a child in your life as a student, library patron or other non family role, identify as part of the queer community and these books can serve as a mirror or you simply want to read or have the kids in your life read books featuring a diversity of experiences to better understand the world, there are a growing number of books in the middle grade realm that will do just that.