'Twilight' Catches Heat in Time For Banned Books Week

By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 9/30/2009

Seems like Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (Little, Brown, 2005) series is a lightening rod for ire.

Just in time for Banned Books Week brings word that the popular vampire series is being cast out of schools—this time in some Australian elementary schools—with the four novels being relegated to segregated sections of libraries where younger students can’t check out any of them.

The reason? Some librarians say the content is too sexual and goes against religious beliefs.

“We wanted to make sure they realize it’s fictitious and ensure they don’t have a wrong grasp on reality,” says Helen Schutz, head librarian of Santa Sabina College at Strathfield in Sydney, Australia, to The Daily Telegraph.

Twilight went through a similar scare after a California school district temporarily banned the series from its 12 middle schools last year, before reversing the decision four days later.

The attempt to remove books from school libraries is hardly limited to teen love stories involving vampires. Classics often come up against complaints too—even 125 years after being published.

“In just the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen challenges to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Charles L. Webster and Co., 1884) and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (Random, 1969),” says Angela Maycock, assistant director for the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom.

Challenges are so prevalent in this country that ALA created a Google Map of just some of the locations where books have been challenged or banned since 2007. Hence the need for Banned Books Week, now in its 28th year, intending to highlight what Maycock calls one of our basic freedoms.

“In a democracy, we have the freedom to read,” she says. “And we celebrate that by drawing attention to recent attempts to restrict that freedom.”

Before a library or school ends up with a book challenge, ALA often suggests that school districts create policies and procedures—a road map to help them diffuse a charged situation. Often, someone attempting to have a book removed just wants their concerns heard. But other times, that’s not enough and a full review process is necessary.

The key to those challenges is remembering what’s at stake, says Maycock—that while choosing not to read a book is a personal choice, attempting to remove it from a library prevents others from making the decision on their own.

“A challenge is not just a complaint,” she says. “It’s someone saying I don’t like it, and I want you to restrict its access for other people and other families.”