'Tango' Tops Most Challenged List for Second Year
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SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 05/12/2008
For the second year in a row, And Tango Makes Three tops the American Library Association's "10 Most Challenged Books" annual list.
The 2007 list, which tracks challenges made to school and public libraries, then filed with the ALA, includes three new entries: Olive’s Ocean (HarperCollins, 2003) by Kevin Henkes; The Golden Compass (Knopf, 1996) by Philip Pullman; and TTYL (Harry Abrams, 2004) by Lauren Myracle.
Several "evergreen" books familiar to school challenges are back on the list. They include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain; The Color Purple (Harcourt, 1992) by Alice Walker; and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Harcourt, 1982) by Maya Angelou.
The ALA has maintained the list for 15 years. And Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the association's Office of Intellectual Freedom, says she's "heartened" by the fact that the total for reported library challenges dropped from 546 in 2006 to 420 last year. That's progress, in contrast to the mid-1990s, when complaints soared as high as 750.
But Stone says she has to put these figures into perspective. "It's nice to see that there are fewer [challenges], but [that news] is always tempered by the knowledge that we never hear about every challenge."
Stone explains that she has a sense of the real numbers of challenges that never formally reach the ALA because she tracks news reports—and she says she fully understands that some librarians never call them in out of fear for their jobs.
"It's pretty well given that for every challenge we get a formal report on, there are four or five out there we never hear about," she says.
Reasons behind the challenges vary widely for the new list. Tango (S & S, 2005) cowritten by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, is a children's picture book about a real-life scenario at a New York zoo in which two male penguins watched over and hatched a baby penguin. The book, says Stone, "is pretty much a target for parents who are concerned about homosexuality being taught in the schools, and it's now sort of a cause célèbre. It consistently gets attention now. We have parents who challenge the book, either because their child brought it home or they got a newsletter from an advocacy group and checked to make sure their school didn't have this book in the classroom or library."
Other books made the list because of community concerns about the use of the "N" word in Huckleberry Finn, sexuality in The Color Purple, and Angelou's description of being raped in Caged Bird.
Pullman's Golden Compass was the target of Christian groups because of the author's criticism of the Church.
