MA High School Bans Book List

Kathy Ishizuka -- School Library Journal, 8/1/2002

Duxbury High School officials in Massachusetts have stopped a local librarian from distributing a summer reading list after parents found certain titles objectionable.

Ellen Snoeyenbos, Duxbury Free Library's young adult librarian, says she was invited to deliver a June 3 booktalk at the school to promote summer reading. But when she gave students a book list as a supplement to Duxbury's required summer reading, the school intervened.

A day after Snoeyenbos's visit, principal Wayne Ogden told her to restrict her booktalks to the school's required titles and to cease her recommendations. "We can only give out our own lists," school superintendent Eileen Williams told the Boston Globe. Williams acknowledged receiving complaints from parents about the library list, which included Steve Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Pocket Bks., 1999), a book involving sexuality in a first relationship; Go Ask Alice (Prentice Hall, 1971), an anonymously written account of drug addiction; and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (Norton, 1996), about yuppies who let off steam by setting up bloodsport rings.

Snoeyenbos says she placed an asterisk on those books and others to alert parents to mature or edgy content, and Ogden approved her list before it was distributed. Snoeyenbos accepts the school's decision, but fears the criteria used to determine reading lists. "I featured books that I knew kids were interested in," she says. "That's why teachers saw me as a good resource."