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2023 Summer Reading - Read Outside Your Comfort Zone: Frequently Challenged Books
ALA Most Challenged Books
Banned Books
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ALA Most Challenged Books
Banned Books
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"Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice--but the weight of history will only tolerate so much." --
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The House Behind the Cedars (1900) is African-American writer Charles Chesnutt's debut novel. Inspired by his own experience as a Black man capable of passing for white-which Chesnutt consciously chose not to do-as well as by Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, The House Behind the Cedars explores themes of identity, race, and class in the post-Civil War South.
Controversial for its portrayal of interracial romance, Chesnutt's novel was critically acclaimed...
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Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity, " as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking,...
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"The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then from the sisters to each other, the novel draws readers into the experiences of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery, and Sofia"--
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When she was only twenty-three, Carson McCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. She was very special, one of America's superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. This novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young girl,...
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On a beautiful June day in 1965, a dozen girls-classmates at a picturesque Blue Ridge women's college-launched their homemade raft (inspired by Huck Finn's) on a trip down the Mississippi. It's Girls A-Go-Go Down the Mississippi read the headline in the Paducah, Kentucky, paper.
Thirty-five years later, four of those "girls" reunite to cruise the river again. This time it's on the luxury steamboat, The Belle of Natchez, and there's no publicity....
7) Ellen Foster
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Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.
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Nonny Frett understands the meaning of "between a rock and a hard place." She's got two mothers, "one deaf-blind and the other four baby steps from flat crazy." She's got two men: her husband, easing out the back door; and her best friend, laying siege to her heart in her front yard. She has a job that holds her in the city, and she's addicted to a little girl stuck deep in the country. And she has two families: the Fretts, who stole her and raised...
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Debutantes (Jennifer Lynn Barnes) volume 1
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Eighteen-year-old Sawyer accepts her estranged grandmother's bribe to live with her for a year, participate in the debutante season and ball, and possibly meet the father she has never known.
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To kill a mockingbird volume 2
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"Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch -- "Scout"--Returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and...
11) Kindred
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Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him. After this first summons, Dana is drawn back, again and again, to the plantation to protect Rufus and ensure that he will grow to manhood and father...
12) The night before
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Caitlyn Montgomery Bandeaux, the prime suspect in the death of her ex-husband, returns to her childhood home to find the truth surrounding her recurring blackouts, leading her to psychologist Adam Hunt whose help unlocks a deadly secret.
13) The grass harp
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From the bestselling author of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's comes the story of three endearing misfits—an orphaned boy and two whimsical old ladies—who take up residence in a tree house.
“Remarkable. . . . Infused with a tender laughter, charming human warmth, [and] a feeling for the positive quality of life.” —New York Herald Tribune
Set on the outskirts of a small...
“Remarkable. . . . Infused with a tender laughter, charming human warmth, [and] a feeling for the positive quality of life.” —New York Herald Tribune
Set on the outskirts of a small...
14) Pew
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Fleeing a past they can no longer remember, Pew wakes on a church bench, surrounded by curious strangers. Pew doesn't have a name, they've forgotten it. Pew doesn't know if they're a girl or a boy, a child or an almost-adult. Is Pew an orphan, or something worse? And what terrible trouble are they running from? Pew won't speak, but the men and women of this small, god-fearing town are full of questions. As the days pass, their insistent clamour will...
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"In 1790, Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan with no memory of her past, arrives on a tobacco plantation where she is put to work as an indentured servant with the kitchen house slaves. Though she becomes deeply bonded to her new family, Lavinia is also slowly accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. As time passes she finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds...
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Laurel Gray Hawthorne's life seems neatly on track--a passionate marriage, a treasured daughter, and a lovely home in suburban Victorianna--until everything she holds dear is suddenly thrown into question the night she is visited by the ghost of a her 13-year old neighbor Molly Dufresne.
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Truman Capote’s first novel is a story of almost supernatural intensity and inventiveness, an audacious foray into the mind of a sensitive boy as he seeks out the grown-up enigmas of love and death in the ghostly landscape of the deep South.
“Intense, brilliant . . . . Capote has an astonishing command . . . a magic all his own.” —The Atlantic
At the age of twelve, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the...
“Intense, brilliant . . . . Capote has an astonishing command . . . a magic all his own.” —The Atlantic
At the age of twelve, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the...
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She has as much business keeping a stray dog as she would walking across Egypt-which not so incidentally is the title of her favorite hymn. She's Mattie Rigsbee, an independent, strong-minded senior citizen who, at seventy-eight, might be slowing down just a bit. When teenage delinquent Wesley Benfield drops in on her life, he is even less likely a companion than the stray dog. But, of course, the dog never tasted her mouth-watering pound cake. Wise...
19) The passenger
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Passenger novels volume 1
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In 1980 Pass Christian, Mississippi: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot's flightbag, the plane's black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring...
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"After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus Crown returns home to Charon County, land of moonshine and cornbread, fist fights and honeysuckle. Seeing his hometown struggling with a bigoted police force inspires him to run for sheriff. He wins, and becomes the first Black sheriff in the history of the county. Then a year to the day after his election, a young Black man is fatally shot by Titus's deputies. Titus pledges to follow the truth wherever...