Banned Books Week | Downers Grove Public Library

1) Gender Queer: A Memoir

Author

Description

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em.
Now, Gender Queer is here.
Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with

...

2) The hate u give

Author

Series

The Hate U Give

Description

"Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters...

3) The bluest eye

Author

Morrison, Toni, 1931-2019

Series

Oprah's book club

Description

Pecola Breedlove, a young eleven-year-old black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dreams grow more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity.--from...

4) Maus: I, My father bleeds history : a survivor's tale

Author

Spiegelman, Art

Description

The author-illustrator traces his father's imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp through a series of disarming and unusual cartoons arranged to tell the story as a novel.

5) To kill a mockingbird

Author

Series

To Kill a Mockingbird
Keith Jennison book
Harper Perennial modern classics
More Series...

Description

A young girl growing up in an Alabama town in the 1930s learns of injustice and violence when her father, a widowed lawyer, defends a black man falsely accused of rape. One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has earned many distinctions since its original publication in 1960. It won the Pulitzer Prize, has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, and been made into an...

6) All boys aren't blue: a memoir-manifesto

Author

Johnson, George M. (George Matthew), 1985-

Description

"In a series of personal essays, journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys."-- Publisher's description.

7) The kite runner

Author

Hosseini, Khaled

Description

Amir, haunted by his betrayal of Hassan, the son of his father's servant and a childhood friend, returns to Kabul as an adult after he learns Hassan has been killed, in an attempt to redeem himself by rescuing Hassan's son from a life of slavery to a Taliban official. An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present. The unforgettable, heartbreaking...

Author

Anderson, Laurie Halse

Series

Thorndike large print young adult series

Description

Overview: The first ten lies they tell you in high school. "Speak up for yourself--we want to know what you have to say." From the first moment of her freshman year at Merryweather High, Melinda knows this is a big fat lie, part of the nonsense of high school. She is friendless, outcast, because she busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, so now nobody will talk to her, let alone listen to her. As time passes, she becomes increasingly isolated...

9) Harry Potter and the sorcerer's stone

Author

Series

Harry Potter series volume 1
Year ... at Hogwarts volume 1
Harry Potter

Description

"Till now there's been no magic for Harry Potter. He lives with the miserable Dursleys at number four, Privet Drive. His room is the cupboard under the stairs, and he hasn't had a birthday party in eleven years. But then a mysterious letter arrives by owl messenger: a letter with an invitiation to an incredible place called Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. And there he finds not only friends, flying sports on broomsticks, and magic in everything...

10) Me and Earl and the dying girl: a novel

Author

Description

Greg Gaines is the last master of high school espionage, able to disappear at will into any social environment. He has only one friend, Earl, and together they spend their time making movies, their own incomprehensible versions of Coppola and Herzog cult classics. Until Greg's mother forces him to rekindle his childhood friendship with Rachel. Rachel has been diagnosed with leukemia -- cue extreme adolescent awkwardness -- but a parental mandate has...

11) Beyond magenta: transgender teens speak out

Author

Description

Six teens tell what it is like for them to be members of the transgender community"--Dust jacket flap.

12) The radium girls: the dark story of America's shining women

Author

Moore, Kate (Writer and editor)

Series

Thorndike Press large print popular and narrative nonfiction

Description

As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were considered the luckiest alive--until they began to fall mysteriously...

13) The adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Author

Twain, Mark, 1835-1910

Series

The Adventures of Tom and Huck
Adventures of Tom and Huck (Twain)
Puffin classics
More Series...

Description

Huckleberry Finn, the best friend of Tom Sawyer, is a young boy in the 1840s, who runs away from home, and floats down the Mississippi River. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, a friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective). It is a direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi...

14) Fahrenheit 451

Author

Bradbury, Ray, 1920-2012

Series

New Portway large print book
Ballantine volume 29466

Description

"Sixty years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce,...

15) Lady Chatterley's lover

Author

Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885-1930

Series

Barnes and Noble classics
Greenwich House classics library
Collector's Library
More Series...

Description

A seductive and beautiful love story. Tells about an aristocrat, Sir Clifford Chatterley, who has come home from the war paralyzed from the waist down. His wife devotes herself to his care, but her husband's bitter arrogance soon makes her existence a nightmare. Selfishly he suggests that she produce an heir. He never dreams that she will break all the rules, and forgetting her social class, take their gamekeeper as her lover.

16) Slaughterhouse-five, or, The children's crusade, a duty-dance with death

Author

Series

Audible studios on Brilliance Audio

Description

From the Publisher: Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes 'unstuck in time' after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden. Slaughterhouse-Five...

17) Their eyes were watching God

Author

Hurston, Zora Neale

Series

EMC masterpiece series access editions
Book club kit
Harper Perennial modern classics

Description

Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years. This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in Black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates boldly and brilliantly African-American culture and heritage....

Author

Wright, Richard, 1908-1960

Series

Perennial classic
Harper Perennial modern classics

Description

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's novel is just as powerful today as when it was written -- in its reflection of poverty and hopelessness, and what...

19) The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian

Author

Alexie, Sherman, 1966-

Description

Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

20) The perks of being a wallflower

Author

Chbosky, Stephen

Description

Charlie is a freshman. And while he's not the biggest geek in the school, he is by no means popular. He's a wallflower - shy and introspective, and intelligent beyond his years, if not very savvy in the social arts. We learn about Charlie through the letters he writes: trying to make friends, family tensions, exploring sexuality, experimenting with drugs - and dealing with his best friend's recent suicide.