A book about book bans has been banned in a Florida school district.
Ban This Book, a children’s book written by Alan Gratz, will no longer be available in the Indian River county school district since the school board voted to remove the book last month.
Gratz’s book, which came out in 2017, follows fourth-grader Amy Anne Ollinger as she tries to check out her favorite book. Ollinger is told by the librarian she cannot, because it was banned after a classmate’s parent thought it was inappropriate. She then creates a secret banned-books library, entering into “an unexpected battle over book banning, censorship, and who has the right to decide what she and her fellow students can read”, according to the book’s description on Gratz’s website.
In a peculiar case of life imitating art, Jennifer Pippin, a parent in the coastal community, challenged the book.
Pippin’s opposition is what prompted the school board to vote 3-2 in favor of removing it from shelves. The vote happened despite the district’s book-review committee vetting the work and deciding to keep it in schools.
Indian River county school board members disagreed with how Gratz’s book referred to other works that had been taken out of school, and accused it of “teaching rebellion of school-board authority”, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.
Pippin is also the chair of the local Moms for Liberty chapter, a far-right organization that has been behind many of the book bans that have swept across the US in recent years. According to a 2023 PEN America report, 81% of school districts that banned books between July 2022 and June 2023 were within or adjoined a county with a local chapter of a group such as Moms for Liberty.
Besides Pippin, two of the school board members who voted in favor of banning the book, Jacqueline Rosario and Gene Posca, had support from Moms for Liberty during their campaigns.
Rosario and Posca did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a statement to the Tallahassee Democrat, Gratz noted the irony of his book being banned.
“They banned the book because it talks about the books that they have banned and because it talks about book banning,” he said. “It feels like they know exactly what they’re doing and they’re somewhat ashamed of what they’re doing and they don’t want a book on the shelves that calls them out.”
Book bans have picked up steam in recent years and not shown any sign of slowing down. In fact, the American Library Association issued data earlier this year that noted there had been a massive uptick in the number of titles targeted for censorship at public libraries in the US in 2023. The number of titles targeted for censorship increased by 92% over the previous year (2022), accounting for about 46% of all book challenges in 2023.
The data also noted that there had been 4,240 unique book titles targeted for censorship, as well as 1,247 demands to censor library books, materials and resources in 2023.
