As a writer and long-time high school English teacher, I find myself deeply troubled by the Tillamook School Board’s decision to ban the lovely novel “How The Garcia Girls Lost their Accents” by renowned author Julia Alvarez. I won’t bother here to go into the long-recognized quality of this book or its author. Many thousands of readers, students, and critics have already attested to that. And MS Alvarez was awarded (among many other honors) the National Medal of Artsin recognition of extraordinary story telling.
So why did the board choose to ban this particular book? From what I can gather, the move was made because one parent found some of the material “obscene” or disturbing. The board then voted, with almost no community input, 3 to 1 to remove the book’s use in the classroom, thus depriving the hundreds of students and teachers who, in my experience, would have found great comfort and meaning in this work. I’m not going to guess why these 3 individuals decided to take such an action, though I have my suspicions. What I would suggest, however, is that those gentlemen take the time to read the full manuscript, and not just those few sentences that were deemed inappropriate.
My other suggestion, and one I’ve used successfully in my own career, is that when a parent or child feels a particular book is upsetting, they should be given an alternate book to read. This can be done with sensitivity and without embarrassment to the student or parent.
Book banning is a slippery slope, one that can lead to a diminishment of freedom and hope. Somewhere in Tillamook, there are students who will be denied an opportunity that may well have been meaningful and even life-changing. We should not allow this to happen.
Butch Freedman
Cape Meares
