John Green writes books geared toward a young adult audience. Sometimes his work includes sexually explicit material or offensive language, and some of his adolescent characters even die. One California school had a problem with this, and Green had a wonderful response to the book's naysayers.
The Riverside Unified School District's book reconsideration committee voted 6-1 to pull all three copies of Green's The Fault In Our Stars from library shelves at Frank Augustus Miller Middle School, according to The Press Enterprise. The Southern California school district will require parental consent for students to check out the book about the 16-year-old cancer patient Hazel Grace Lancaster and her teenage love affair with a boy from her cancer support group.
"I just didn't think it was appropriate for an 11-, 12-, 13-year-old to read," parent Karen Krueger told the Enterprise. She didn't agree with the novel's subject matter on teenage death, use of crude language and teen sex. "I was really shocked it was in a middle school."
One of Green's fans asked him about the recent ban on his Tumblr page. The author has commented on his other banned books ("Looking For Alaska" and "An Abundance Of Katherines") in the past and didn't miss the opportunity to take this school district to task.
"I guess I am both happy and sad," he wrote. "I am happy because apparently young people in Riverside, California will never witness or experience mortality since they won't be reading my book, which is great for them. But I am also sad because I was really hoping I would be able to introduce the idea that human beings die to the children of Riverside, California and thereby crush their dreams of immortality."
The author also took offense to a Buffalo-area school district calling his novel "Looking For Alaska" "pornographic" in 2008. "I am not a pornographer," Green immediately stated in a YouTube video expressing his frustration toward the Depew, N.Y., community members who didn't agree that his book should be taught in the high school's 11th grade English classes.
The Depew School Board eventually voted unanimously to keep the book in the class curriculum, according to Green's YouTube page. "More than 99 percent of parents allowed their kids to read the book, and it was taught without incident or complaint. Huzzah," Green posted.
"Looking For Alaska" has frequently appeared on banned or challenged book lists since it was published in 2005. Green won the 2006 Michael L. Printz Award from the American Library Association for the novel.
Highland Park High School in Dallas, Texas also banned Green's "An Abundance Of Katherines" because of its "sexual situations," according to The Daily Dot. The school made their decision during this year's "Banned Books Week."
