“If you must write about us, at least give a damn about us,” she writes. Coe points out, national news stories that paint all rural Tennesseans as illiterate antisemites don’t help those efforts.

This opinion piece reports that the backlash against book-banning is already beginning in Tennessee, where the McMinn County school board has banned Maus, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its eighth-grade social studies curriculum.Īs Whitney Kimball Coe, director of National Programs at the Center for Rural Strategies, pointed out in The Daily Yonder, many people in McMinn County itself are outraged by their school board’s decision, and are trying to counter it with library donations and community discussions about antisemitism and even plans to run for the school board. Fits the bill as quick and entertaining, meaningful adult reading. It is one of those books often assigned in middle school, and this is the time we are reading all the middle school books. This is a book that should totally be banned and burned if you don’t want kids to examine their own privilege, think about fairness and class, or confront racism. There are also tangerines, the fruit, which play a special role in the narrative. He readily picks the latter, for some very good reasons, and there he meets his first real fears, his first real friends, and sets about making and breaking heroes. He is forced to leave his white suburban school and either attend a nearby Catholic school, or alternatively, go to the “inner-city” tough kid not very white school.

Tangerine* by Edward Bloor is written from the perspective of a sort of disabled (but not really? that’s part of the plot) middle school who is white, frail, very smart, repressed, and an excellent soccer player.

Tangerine bloor novel book buy