Jodi Picoult is voting for the books this election season.
The bestselling author has teamed up with PEN America, a nonprofit organization that advocates for writers and books, to encourage readers to consider what’s at stake with books on Election Day.
In an Instagram Reel shared on Oct. 28, Picoult, 58, says her 2008 novel Nineteen minutes was the most frequently banned book during the 2023-2024 school year, in 98 school districts across the country. The book is about school shootings, which Picoult says is “something that, unfortunately, our kids don’t need books to learn about.”
“Actually, hundreds of students told me Nineteen minutes it stopped them from committing a school shooting or showed them they weren’t alone in feeling isolated,” she continues. “The book didn’t hurt them. It gave them the tools to deal with an increasingly divided and different world.”
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“That’s what books do,” Picoult notes in the video. “They help kids see themselves in a different way. They help kids see the world in a different way.”
The author explains that the reason the book is usually banned is because of the “date rape scene” and because it uses “anatomically correct words for the human body.”
“It’s not an unnecessary scene,” says Picoult. “It’s not rude. It’s been challenged as pornography, though.”
Book banners use pornography “as an excuse to ban more than 10,000 books from public schools in the last school year,” she continues, noting that many of those books were written by BIPOC and LGTBQ+ authors.
Jodi Picoult 2023.
Lou Rocco/ABC via Getty
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“And spoiler alert: They’re not pornography,” Picoult adds, before explaining that states across the U.S. have passed laws that have made it increasingly easy to ban books. “We know from history that the way you control a nation is by controlling what its citizens read,” adds Picoult, telling followers he’s “voting for books” this November.
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‘Nineteen minutes’.
Atria/Emily Bestler books
According to the American Library Association, from 2022 to 2023, there was a 65 percent increase in titles targeted for censorship with more than 4,000 titles listed for removal from school districts and libraries.
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Nineteen minutes, as Picoult explained in her post, it centers on school shootings. “Sterling is an ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens—until the day its complacency is shattered by a school shooting,” reads the book’s synopsis.
“Josie Cormier, the daughter of the judge presiding over the case, is supposed to be the state’s best witness, but she can’t remember what happened in front of her eyes – or can she?”
“As the trial progresses, rifts between the high school and the adult community begin to show – destroying the closest friendships and families,” the summary concludes.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education