'The Truth About Alice' Survives Book-Banning Attempt in 12-0 Vote by FPC and Matanzas Panels | FlaglerLive (2024)

The Jennifer Mathieu novel is–spoiler alert–about the ruinous consequences of false rumors. Alice Franklin, a high school girl, is said to have slept with two boys at the same party, then to have caused the death of one of them because she was supposedly texting with him when he died in a car crash. Cue the slu*t-shaming.

It is the fifth book to have survived a challenge, out of 22 challenged since last fall. Ten have been removed, five are still under review, and two were not in circulation.

The 12-0 vote to keep the book was the result of the latest, 90-minute review session by the two committees meeting jointly at Matanzas since the book was challenged at both schools. The committees are made up of English teachers, media specialists, administrators, and members of the public.

The votes aren’t final. The school-based committees’ decisions may be appealed to a district-level committee, and that committee’s decision then becomes Superintendent Cathy Mittelstadt’s to ratify or reject. Her decision may be appealed to the School Board. With a signal, still-rankling exception involving a challenge by a school board member, Mittelstadt has respected the findings of school committees.

Led in this case by Matanzas High School Media Specialist Catherine Brandner, committee members first discussed the book’s themes generally, its tone and intent and, to some extent, its literary merits. They agreed the sometimes pedestrian book was nowhere near a masterpiece–“decent” was the most they could muster–but also that it was not without enough redeeming value, either: “This encourages questioning of what you read/hear,” the committee agreed in one sum-up. “Our students now have no way for rumors to stop (texting, social media etc.). This is real for our students because it happens 24/7 for them.”

Since the challenge included a list of objectionable passages, the committee then addressed those page by page. It then provided its own written review in question-and-answer format, based on a district-issued template, thus documenting its reasoning, and doing so with far more thoughtfulness and rigor than the challenge that prompted the review.

In that sense, the session contrasted sharply with the bitter, de-contextualized and intellectually dishonest attacks on books by moms-for-liberty types calling for bans at school board meetings, and that overheated television screens across the country starting in 2021.

In these cases, the challenges appear to have played a role in the removal, as many of the “weeded” titles were controversial. While school librarians’ self-censorship is nothing new, the challenges, hazed in a politically toxic climate at times vilifying librarians or calling them criminals, has encouraged more self-censorship. (See: “Soft and Quiet: Self-Censorship in an Era of Book Challenges” and “Flagler Schools Have Been Quietly Banning or ‘Removing’ Many Books Since Summer in Bow to ‘Moms for Liberty’.”)

A half dozen books remain under review. Book review committees are scheduled every few weeks, to give their members time to read the books. Some members, as was the case with The Truth About Alice, read the book twice.

The website’s “objectionable” pages are all identical to the pages McDonald listed as oibjectionable, and that required the committee to go through.

In sum, while it took the challenger a matter of minutes to cut and paste pat phrases and page numbers from the book-banning site onto a formal challenge in Flagler, it triggered the investment of untold hours of work–much of it in the faculty members’ own time–school resources and efforts, culminating in those lengthy book-review sessions, which may et not be the end of it.

In the current case, the objections were to such lines as “I mean, it was one thing to be a girl who’d had sex. But it was something else entirely to be a girl who’d had sex with two guys in one night,” or “‘Mark my words, man,’ Brandon said, ‘that dude is never going to get any puss*. Ever.’,” or “Brandon was saying something else about Alice Franklin’s tit*,” or “I gave him a blow j*b,” and so on, with similarly juvenile language middle and high school students hear and speak more frequently in a day than there are puns in the entirety of Finnegans Wake. The book, according to the moms’ talking-points website, also includes occurrences of the word ass (three times), bitch (three), dick (two), f*ck (four), piss (five), puss* (one) and sh*t (eight).

“It’s just mimicking the way teenagers talk,” a committee member said of the language.

The committee read the relevant state law and local board policy controlling whether books or library materials qualify as holdings. A central principal of the law is that the materials have to have “literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”

The passage about a blow j*b administered had also been flagged. Committee members aid the act was referred to–not described–and in the book, it had a seemingly redemptive purpose, at least as committee members saw it: “The whole purpose of reading books is to live vicariously through characters so that you don’t have to experience these things,” one member said. “For our students to understand that a character did this and feels terrible about it afterwards is a moment that I think that if somebody were reading this they could be like, ‘I don’t want to do that because the character felt this way. I would feel this way. That’s not something I want to feel.'”

“I agree it’s an unsafe choice made by this character, but the the purpose of this is to discourage,” another member said.

Then it was onto another instance of the use of the word “slu*t,” and on it went.

If the ostensibly salacious passages drew much of the committee’s attention, it was only because of the obsession to that end in the challenge: that’s what they were there to discuss. But an even greater part of the discussion branched into the various points of view of the book, its projected messages (it is written from the perspective of four or five different characters, including Alice), the distinctions between fictional characters and reality and the aims of fiction itself.

At times the book’s narrative intersected with committee members’ memories. “Back when I was in high school, however many decades ago, we won’t go into that,” one said, “I had a girl who told me about almost this exact same experience, and my heart broke for her. And my heart broke for this character with that happening for her.”

The next school-level review committee meeting is scheduled for 3 p.m. on Feb. 16 at Matanzas to take up the challenge to The Black Flamingo, the 2020 novel by Dean Atta that Kirkus Review called “Gripping, unflinching, and unforgettable” for its coming of age account of a boy caught between different worlds and identities, that Time Magazine named one of the 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time, that won a Stonewall Book Award, and that McDonald–or the website site that uses the same language–says contains references to sexuality and to “alternate genders, racism and racist commentary.”