After months of review, the Matanuska-Susitna School District’s Library Citizens Advisory Committee has decided that some books that had been recommended to be pulled from middle school and high school libraries can go back on the shelves.
Since August 2023, committee has been reviewing books that were challenged by community members due to their possible inappropriateness for teens.
The books being re-shelved in the MatSu public middle and high schools are:
Book Title: Author: The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini Persepolis Marjane Satrapi Flamer Mike Curato Sold Patricia McCormick Drama Graphic Novel Raina Telgemeier A Court of Thorns and Roses Sarah Maas Court of Frost and Starlight Sarah Maas Court of Wings Ruin Sarah Maas The Perks of Being a Wallflower Stephan Chbosky
“With respect to each of the remanded titles above, the School District conducted an internal review and has concluded that none of the works would meet the criminal obscenity standard set forth under Alaska Law. The School District instructed its library staff to return the remanded titles to circulation in both middle schools and high schools,” a memo to parents at one school said.
The books have various passages that are controversial and most of them have been removed from school libraries in other states.
For example, the book, “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” by Sarah Maas, contains sexual descriptions and mild violence, and some argue that this series of novels gets more explicit as it progresses and has domestic violence, emotional, physical, sexual abuse, post traumatic stress, anxiety, depression, graphic violence, and graphic death. In 2023, North Carolina’s library board removed it from the shelves of K-12 libraries because its content is too disturbing for youth.
In the book, “Flamer,” by Mike Curato, there’s a number of LGBTQ+ themes and characters, and the book is sexually explicit at its core, with extensive vulgarity and detailed descriptions of sexual acts. In one section, Curato writs about a scout troop masturbating into a bottle, with one boy daring others to drink the result. But it’s going back on the shelf in MatSu schools.
In “Kite Runner,” a novel by Khaled Hosseini, students as young as the 6th grade will encounter children being raped by older children and adults, and children and women being abused in war-torn Afghanistan. An extremely graphic book, the American Library Association reported that it’s one of the most frequently challenged novels of the 21st century.
The American Civil Liberties Union and Northern Justice Project sued the district in November for removing the books, even though the district had set forth a procedure for review.
Savannah Fletcher, an attorney for the Northern Justice Project and candidate for Alaska Senate, represented the plaintiffs and said the district has no right to remove any books from shelves, even temporarily for review.
Out of 600,000 books, just 56 had been removed for review, but it was enough to draw a lawsuit from the Left.
The original list of the removed books can be found here.
The Matanuska-Susitna School District’s Library Citizens Advisory Committee meets monthly, with the next meeting on June 13. All meetings are open to the public.
