Fighting Book Bans Across Time

Milo Parker's grandmother ran a Seattle library branch for forty years. When she dies she leaves six cardboard boxes, and in the fourth one, under a warranty for a fan, he finds a page typed in 1974 that describes an afternoon in 1950 in the present tense. She was twelve years old in 1950.Under the page there is a strip of plain card, six inches long, with one corner worn round by somebody else's hands.Laid into a particular copy at a particular page, with a date said out loud, it puts him behind the eyes of a reader who stopped there. He arrives whole and wrong-footed, in his own shoes. He understands every word spoken around him and cannot produce one of them. He cannot change anything the record already says. And the copy he used goes white, edge to edge, taking every reader it ever carried with it.A state committee in the Seattle Armory in July 1948, asking professors what they have read. A courtyard in Beijing in November 1968, where a neighbor lends a child a novel wrapped in newspaper with its covers and its first and last pages taken off. A desk in Buenos Aires in October 1977, where two men decide on paper that a children's story about an elephant is preparatory to subversion.At Halvorsen High School nothing is banned. Forty-one titles sit on a cart behind the library desk, pending a review nobody has scheduled. Four parents have filed on the same template, each asking only for their own child. Eleven of the forty-one were never cataloged, so no student search can find them. Every adult in the chain is doing the job correctly, and the one who refuses is the only one who can be fired for it.So Milo starts writing it down, and so do the others, and what they bring home from the past is not a rescue. It is a method. Find the record nobody filed as a record. Ask the readers the system never counted. Make somebody put the reason in writing, because a stated reason outlives the person who states it.They get thirty-nine books back onto a shelf. They do not get everything. Three weeks later the cost lands on the person with the least protection in the building, in one line of a budget worksheet that mentions none of it.For readers of:●        Markus Zusak, The Book Thief, for the historical narrator inside a documented catastrophe●        Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity, because there the record is the story●        Alan Gratz, Ban This Book, the nearest fiction on the subject, for younger readers and a louder register●        Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books, for a reader who wants the history afterward