A. L. Kaplan

Tag: challenged book

  • Banned And Challenged Books I’ve Read: James and the Giant Peach

    Banned And Challenged Books I’ve Read: James and the Giant Peach

    Exercise Your Rights:

    Read Banned Books

    James and the Giant Peach

    Roald Dahl

    I was surprised to learn this book has been challenged. Yes, it has scarry things, but so does life. In the end, James finally finds the home he deserves. I read it years ago.

    James Henry Trotter lives with two ghastly hags. Aunt Sponge is enormously fat with a face that looks boiled and Aunt Spiker is bony and screeching. He’s very lonely until one day something peculiar happens. . . At the end of the garden a peach starts to grow and GROW AND GROW. Inside that peach are seven very unusual insects – all waiting to take James on a magical adventure. But where will they go in their GIANT PEACH, and what will happen to the horrible aunts if they stand in their way? There’s only one way to find out . . .

    James and the Giant Peach is not permanently “banned” but has been frequently challenged and temporarily restricted in various schools and libraries due to its depiction of scary scenes (like the death of the aunts), references to drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, vulgar language (such as “ass”), and themes of disobedience and mystical elements. These challenges stem from concerns that the book promotes unsuitable behavior, contains offensive language, or is too frightening for the intended audience.  

  • Banned And Challenged Books I’ve Read: A Wrinkle in Time

    Banned And Challenged Books I’ve Read: A Wrinkle in Time

    Exercise Your Rights:

    Read Banned Books

    A Wrinkle in Time

    Madeleine L’Engle

    I read this book in collage as an assignment. It was a lot of fun. My daughter really liked it as well. While not banned, it has been challenged several times.

    It was a dark and stormy night; Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come down to the kitchen for a midnight snack when they were upset by the arrival of a most disturbing stranger.

    “Wild nights are my glory,” the unearthly stranger told them. “I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me sit down for a moment, and then I’ll be on my way. Speaking of ways, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”

    A tesseract (in case the reader doesn’t know) is a wrinkle in time. To tell more would rob the reader of the enjoyment of Miss L’Engle’s unusual book. A Wrinkle in Time, winner of the Newberry Medal in 1963, is the story of the adventures in space and time of Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O’Keefe (athlete, student, and one of the most popular boys in high school). They are in search of Meg’s father, a scientist who disappeared while engaged in secret work for the government on the tesseract problem.

    A Wrinkle in Time is not an officially banned book, but it has been frequently challenged and sometimes removed from school libraries for various controversial reasons, including its blend of science and religion, the portrayal of witches and magical elements, and the depiction of Jesus alongside other great thinkers, which some find blasphemous while others find it too secular.