It's extremely rare that you'll hear me advocating for a book to be challenged. But as my former classmate (and published author) Corey Redekop asks in his post on this year's Freedom to Read Week celebrations: “could you challenge me? Call a
library and demand that I be taken off the shelves? Nothing sells a
person on a book like a little controversy.”
So if you want to help out a fellow librarian, go to your local library this week and put in a challenge against “Shelf Monkey”. It could actually be fun – like a banned book flash mob – and since Corey's book has censorship as one of its central themes – it'd be a perfect fit.
Hmmm, I started this post with my tongue firmly in cheek but I'm talking myself into this…I think it'd make a really good statement about censorship if a book that is firmly against censorship had a bunch of challenges during Freedom to Read Week, especially if they all used the same reason. Something like “This book is wrong with its theme that censorship is wrong.”
It's a bit of a conflict of interest (or at least potentially awkward) for us public librarians to do this at our home libraries. So hopefully you academic librarians out there pick up the torch (or we in public libraries could put in a challenge of Corey's book at a neighbouring town – that would work too!)