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21)
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One tough cookie. Eleven-year-old Gilly has been stuck in more foster families than she can remember, and she's disliked them all intensely. She has a county-wide reputation for being brash, brilliant, and completely unmangable. So when she's sent to live with the Trotters -- by far the strangest family yet--Gilly decides to put her brilliant mind to work. Before long she's devised an elaborate scheme to get her real mother to come "rescue" her. But the rescue doens't work out quite the way she planned. And when the time comes for her to go, the great Gilly Hopkins is left thinking that maybe life with the Trotters wasn't so bad after all.
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Complaint: Offensive language
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22)
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Meg Murray, her little brother Charles Wallace, and their mother are having a midnight snack on a dark and stormy night when an unearthly stranger appears at their door. He claims to have been blown off course, and goes on to tell them that there is such a thing as a "tesseract," which, if you didn't know, is a wrinkle in time. Meg's father had been experimenting with time-travel when he suddenly disappeared. Will Meg, Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin outwit the forces of evil as they search through space for their father?
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Challenged at the Polk City, Fla. Elementary School (1985) by a parent who believed that the story promotes witchcraft, crystal balls, and demons. Challenged in the Anniston Ala. schools (1990). The complainant objected to the book's listing the name of Jesus Christ together with the names of great artists, philosophers, scientists, and religious leaders when referring to those who defend earth against evil.
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23)
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The torture and hell of adolescence has rarely been captured as clearly as it is in this classic diary by an anonymous, addicted teen. Lonely, awkward, and under extreme pressure from her "perfect" parents, "Anonymous" swings madly between optimism and despair. When one of her new friends spikes her drink with LSD, this diarist begins a frightening journey into darkness. The drugs take the edge off her loneliness and self-hate, but they also turn her life into a nightmare of exalting highs and excruciating lows. Although there is still some question as to whether this diary is real or fictional, there is no question that it has made a profound impact on millions of readers during the more than 25 years it has been in print.
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Complaints: Offensive language, drug use, sexual themes
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24)
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A coming of age tale for young adults set in the trenches of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, Fallen Angels is the story of Perry, a Harlem teenager who volunteers for the service when his dream of attending college falls through. Sent to the front lines, Perry and his platoon come face-to-face with the Vietcong and the real horror of warfare. But violence and death aren't the only hardships. As Perry struggles to find virtue in himself and his comrades, he questions why black troops are given the most dangerous assignments, and why the U.S. is there at all.
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Complaints: Offensive language, violence
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25)
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When asked, Maurice Sendak insisted that he was not a comics artist, but an illustrator. However, it's hard to not notice comics aspects in works like In the Night Kitchen. The child of the story is depicted floating from panel to panel as he drifts through the fantastic dream world of the bakers' kitchen. Sendak's use of multiple panels and integrated hand-lettered text is an interesting contrast to his more traditional children's books containing single-page illustrations such as his wildly popular Where the Wild Things Are.
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Complaints: Nudity (Mick loses his pajamas when he falls in the kitchen.)
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26)
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In the first of three books about the zany Stupid family, the Stupids decide to go out--only after taking a bath with all their clothes on (and no water). With their dog Kitty driving, the Stupids visit Grandma and Grandpa Stupid, after which they enjoy a mashed potato sundae with butterscotch sauce, Yuck!
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27)
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This Roald Dahl classic tells the scary, funny and imaginative tale of a seven-year-old boy who has a run-in with some real-life witches! "In fairy tales witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks and they ride on broomsticks. But this is not a fairy tale. This is about REAL WITCHES. REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ordinary jobs. That is why they are so hard to catch." Witches, as our hero learns, hate children. With the help of a friend and his somewhat-magical grandmother, our hero tries to expose the witches before they dispose of him. Ages 7-12.
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Complaint: Promotes witchcraft
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28)
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An uninhibited, no-holds-barred sex manual illustrated with 60 explicit line drawings and eight pages of color paintings, the book is also intended as a guide to coming out for closeted gay men. The alphabetically arranged entries conversationally urge readers to delve into psychosocial aspects of gay life and to explore such topics as body image, fidelity, homophobia, jealousy, parents and racism in the gay community.
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Complaints: Sex, homosexual themes, pornographic
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29)
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The first and best book in the very popular series describes the ups and downs of a precocious ten-year-old girl. Anastasia loves keeping lists of important information in her green notebook; when she discovers that her mother is pregnant, she instantly adds two new items to her "things I hate" list: "My parents" and "babies." But as the year passes, Anastasia finds that the items on her lists keep moving around; by the time her baby brother is born, the only thing left to hate is liver. An unusually warm, insightful and original portrait of childhood and family life, this is a special and memorable story. Horn Book called Anastasia "an amusing and engaging heroine" and The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books wrote, "the whole book is a delight." Ages 8-12.
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Complaints: Profanity, underage drinking
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30)
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Wimp, nerd, social retard some kids just naturally become scapegoats. Luckily an inner strength and an ability to survive sometimes surface, and these same scapegoats can confound their parents and acquaintances. Cole portrays this when fellow campers leave wimpy Howie Mitchell and ``real dog'' Laura Golden naked and scared on an island. When counselors arrive looking for them, Howie misunderstands and fears the return of their tormenters. He forces non-swimmer Laura to hang onto a log and float to the mainland. Reaching the safety of a deserted cabin, and realizing that they can't face returning to camp, they plot their survival until Parent's Weekend, when Laura's mother will visit, offering hope of sanctuary. Cole manages to instill just the right amount of suspense in their adventures through a potentially dangerous street kid, a cleaning woman who wants to turn them in to the police, and a sheriff who eventually snags them. Grade 8-10.
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Complaints: Profanity, nudity
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31)
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Kaffir Boy does for apartheid-era South Africa what Richard Wright's Black Boy did for the segregated American South. In stark prose, Mathabane describes his life growing up in a nonwhite ghetto outside Johannesburg--and how he escaped its horrors. Hard work and faith in education played key roles, and Mathabane eventually won a tennis scholarship to an American university. This is not, needless to say, an opportunity afforded to many of the poor blacks who make up most of South Africa's population. And yet Mathabane reveals their troubled world on these pages in a way that only someone who has lived this life can.
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Removed from sophomore reading list at Armijo High School in Fairfield, CA (2000) due to its sexual content.
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32)
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Blubber is a good name for her, the note from Caroline said about Linda. Jill crumpled it up and left it on the corner of her school desk. She didn't want to think about Linda or her dumb report on the whale just then. Jill wanted to think about Halloween. But Robby grabbed the note and before Linda stopped talking it had gone halfway around the room. That's where it all started...there was something about Linda that made a lot of kids in her fifth-grade class want to see how far they could go...but nobody, Jill least of all, expected the fun to end where it did.
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Complaints: Offensive language, unsuited to age group
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33)
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A group of students kidnap their teacher to "teach him a lesson," but their plans go awry when he dies, leaving them in a morass of lies and guilt.
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Complaints: Offensive language, violence, sexual content
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34)
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Award-winning poet Eve Merriam conjures up 26 titillating and teasing Halloween poems, one for each letter of the alphabet, accompanied by the delightfully wicked illustrations of Lane Smith.
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Challenged at the Douglas County Library in Roseburg, Oreg. (1989) because the book encourages devil worshipping. Challenged at the Howard County, Md. School libraries (1991) because "there should be an effort to tone down Halloween and there should not be books about it in the schools." Challenged in the Wichita, Kans. Public schools (1991) because it is "satanic and disgusting."
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35)
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In an unapologetically severe story about four boys who victimize Karen Jerome and her family, Cormier once again explores the potential for malice in all of us. The teenagers leave the Jeromes' home in ruin; Karen is assaulted and subsequently hospitalized in a coma. Not for the squeamish, Cormier's novel doesn't mince words: "The vandals shit on the floors and pissed on the walls and trashed their way through the seven-room Cape Cod cottage." Like Robert Westall (The Machine Gunners; Blitzcat), Cormier surpasses most other writers by the sheer force of his words. Much more than a pulp thriller, this compelling, richly textured novel is told from several points of view, including that of the vandals themselves. Cormier illuminates even the darkest characters with humanity, so that in the end, readers see the complicated fabric of life itself. Motives, thoughts and feelings are set forth -- not without hope, but irrevocably tragic as well. Ages 13-up.
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Pulled out of elementary and junior high school libraries in Stockton after parents complained that it glorifies alcoholism and violence, contains a rape scene and its characters use too much profanity.
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36)
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Controversy should erupt anew when Humphry's suicide manual for the terminally ill, newly revised and expanded, tries to match in paper the successes that it enjoyed in cloth, including 18 weeks on PW's bestseller list.
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Complaint: Promotes suicide
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37)
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In a startling departure from her previous novels ( Lady Oracle , Surfacing ), respected Canadian poet and novelist Atwood presents here a fable of the near future. In the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, far-right Schlafly/Falwell-type ideals have been carried to extremes in the monotheocratic government. The resulting society is a feminist's nightmare: women are strictly controlled, unable to have jobs or money and assigned to various classes: the chaste, childless Wives; the housekeeping Marthas; and the reproductive Handmaids, who turn their offspring over to the "morally fit" Wives.
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Removed from the Chicopee, Mass. High School English class reading list because it contains profanity and sex.
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38)
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Faced with the prospect of a disagreeable arranged marriage or a journey acoss the barren Alaskan tundra, 13-year-old Miyax chooses the tundra. She finds herself caught between the traditional Eskimo ways and the modern ways of the whites. Miyax, or Julie as her pen pal Amy calls her, sets out alone to visit Amy in San Francisco, a world far away from Eskimo culture and the frozen land of Alaska. During her long and arduous journey, Miyax comes to appreciate the value of her Eskimo heritage, learns about herself, and wins the friednship of a pack of wolves. After learning the language of the wolves and slowly earning their trust, Julie becomes a member of the pack.
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Challenged in Mexico, Mo. (1982) because of the book's "socialist, communist, evolutionary, and anti-family themes." Challenged in Littleton, Colo. (1989) school libraries because "the subject matter was better suited to older students, not sixth graders." Challenged at the Erie Elementary School in Chandler, Ariz. (1994) because the book includes a passage that some parents found inappropriate in which a man forcibly kisses his wife. Challenged in the classrooms and school libraries in Palmdale, Calif. (1995) because the book describes a rape. Removed from the sixth-grade curriculum of the New Brighton Area School District in Pulaski Township, Pa. (1996) because of a graphic marital rape scene. Challenged at the Hanson Lane Elementary School in Ramona, Calif. (1996) because the award-winning book includes an attempted rape of a 13-year-old girl.
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39)
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The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the classic first novel by Toni Morrison -- Winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.
It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she Will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
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Complaints: Sexual themes, offensive language, racial themes
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40)
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With scads of personal stories and an abundance of useful, detailed information about girls' changing bodies and feelings, author Lynda Madaras and her daughter Area Madaras have expanded their guide for girls on the verge of change. First published in 1983, the bestselling classic has been revised and updated several times over the years to keep up with ever evolving facts and wisdom about puberty in girls. In this third edition, the authors continue their straight talk on the menstrual cycle, reproductive organs, breasts, emotional changes, puberty in boys, body hair, pimples, masturbation, and all the other fun, scary, and interesting things that go along with growing up.
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Missing from the Northside Intermediate School library in Milton, Wis. (1994) after a parent complained "I don't think my ten-year-old son, or anyone's, needs to know that stuff." Challenged, but retained at the Washoe County Library System in Reno, Nev. (1994) because "nobody in their right mind would give a book like that to children on their own, except the library."
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