A couple of weeks ago, I saw a post on Facebook about the cancellation of author Rainbow Rowell’s appearance at a Minnesota library, due to parent objections over some language and issues contained in her novel, Eleanor & Park, selected by local librarians for their high school’s summer reading program. The group of parent protesters also called for the librarians to pull the book from library shelves, and for those same librarians to be “punished.” (What form the punishment for those librarians would actually take remains a mystery, though I can’t imagine there’s anything worse you could do to a librarian than banning books).

Well, that’s all this writer/freedom fighter needed to hear. I added that book to my Goodreads To-Read list faster than you can say “Censorship Sucks.” It’s taken me a little while to get to Eleanor & Park, because I usually only read one book at a time and I was finishing up Atlas Shrugged (thank you, Jen Lancaster), but when I did, I was a goner. I tore through it in less than a day.

As a writer, I love the way Rowell burrows so deeply inside her characters’ heads and souls–I felt like I was walking around in their very skins. Sometimes, that walk was painful and humiliating, sometimes it was sublime, but it was unflinchingly intimate. Though I thought she took a bit of a risk, switching back and forth from Park’s to Eleanor’s perspectives, it worked, and added a layer of believability that would’ve been sorely missed without those switches. Oh, and a word about Park’s mom? So funny, so complicated, so much deeper than I initially thought–like all human beings.

But no matter how much I loved it and wanted to stick to my Book Banners Suck platform, I’m not just a writer: I’m also a parent, and even though my knee-jerk and visceral reaction to any form of attempted censorship by any group, no matter how well-intentioned, will always drive me straight to those censored works, when I started reading the book, and tried looking at it strictly as a parent, I could (grudgingly) see the censors’ point of view.

Yes, there is offensive language (including the c-word, which I personally find abhorrent). Yes, there is teen drug and alcohol use. There is teen sex. There is abuse. As a parent, heck, yeah, I want to find it shocking that my children’s tender sensibilities would be exposed to such language and such themes.

But folks, in addition to being a writer and a parent, I used to be a high school teacher, so I bring an added perspective to this with which some parents-in-denial may disagree; they’ll certainly not be happy to hear it. For better or for worse, here it is:

By the time the vast majority of kids enter high school, they’ve likely heard most, if not all of those offensive words, if not used them themselves out of their parents’ hearing. If they watch television or go to the movies or play video games, they’ve already been exposed to sexually-charged content. Think they haven’t yet encountered alcohol or drugs? The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry states that alcohol and drug use among teens is on the rise, with the average age of first use now between 12 and 14 years of age.

This is not fiction. This is the reality that our kids are surrounded by every day, despite our best attempts to shelter them. These things are not happening because of this book or any other book (my thoughts about that would be a separate post completely). They’ve been happening for years. Removing this book from their libraries, forbidding the author to come and speak to them about why she wrote the book and the important positive messages it contains for teens–that’s not going to prevent our babies from coming into contact with those negative experiences. By the time most kids have reached high school, that ship’s probably already sailed.

What pulling this book from libraries will accomplish is preventing teens from experiencing Rowell’s very powerful good messages, about things like standing up for what’s right; not judging people by what they wear or how they look but by who they are inside; acceptance of “otherness”; tolerance; anti-bullying; love. It’s not easy to be a teen today, any more than it was easy to be a teen back in the 80s, when Eleanor & Park is set. Trying to block teen reality today by pulling books like this from library shelves is not only ineffective, but if you know anything about teen psychology at all, for them, forbidden fruit is the absolute tastiest fruit of all. (And sometimes, banned books go on to become the very “classics” your grandchildren wind up studying later. I’m just sayin’.)

I suggest that a better approach than straying into censorship, no matter how well intentioned,  would be for parents to read this book with their teens, to let it open a dialogue about what their lives are really like, about the very real, very intense feelings they’re experiencing, the difficult choices they’re making on a daily basis. I think many parents would be surprised by what they’d learn about them and their world.

The reality is that many teens, even those whose parents have managed to successfully shelter them all these years, are probably going to hear those awful words during their high school years. They’ll feel those terrible feelings, make those difficult choices, maybe even experience some of these agonizing events, whether this book is banned or not. But if, instead of banning, parents make the brave choice to share this book with their teens, it could serve as a tool for honest, positive discussions about some very real, very tough things in their lives.

Bottom line: Give it a chance, parents; it’s beautifully written, devastatingly poignant, and keenly insightful. I can’t imagine denying this to anyone.

My two cents, for whatever you think they’re worth.