If you need more evidence that just about anything can offend somebody, here it is. Carolyn Mackler's young adult novel The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things is under attack in Maryland. It's difficult to believe the superintendent actually read the book before he removed it from the library. Here's an account of the events in question, from the Baltimore Messenger:
One surefire way of getting Johnny to read
12/19/05
By Lou PanosThere are times when the surest way to make something more attractive to teenagers is to label it "forbidden." For Carolyn Mackler's book, "The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things," now is such a time in Carroll County.
Schools superintendent Charles Ecker declared the book off limits and off the shelves of county school libraries after some parents and other guardians of pubertal morality launched into high dudgeon over its sexual content and expressive language.
In truth, these elements are decidedly subordinate to the thrust of the book and are quite limited in number. The 246-page novel has virtually no explicit description of sexual intercourse, or going "all the way," and only about a half-dozen uses of the "f" word, almost all of those in depicting an angry exchange between a mother who is a child psychiatrist and a "good" daughter who is socially frustrated, overweight and confused. If you're an adult who has survived tense discussions with teenagers in your own home, chances are you might find the story a bit tiresome.
Conversely, those searching for redeeming values in the book needn't look far. Its message is a wholesome variation of the adage that there is so much bad in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us that, flawed as we all are, it ill behooves any of us to blanketly condemn the rest of us.
Read the rest here.
