There’s something so romantic about road trips. There’s so much potential romance fodder. Two people alone in a car for hours, beautiful scenery changing outside (perhaps even as the character’s hearts change), tensions inevitably escalating over the course of the trip. Then there’s a disagreement about the playlist or snack choices or which route to take that pushes one person too far and the conflict explodes all over the inside of the windshield and even gets stuck in the cup holders. But there’s nowhere for the characters to go in this middle place. They aren’t home, they’re not at their destination yet, so the only choice is to deal with the messy emotions before the journey ends.

Just like when they have to unexpectedly make an overnight pit stop, the only choice is to share the last remaining bed the motel/inn/bed and breakfast has. It’s just good sense, as Sarah MacLean says. The forced proximity makes tough emotions that have been buried surface in an expedited way that not much else can.

Road trip romances put the main characters in a pressure cooker. There’s a firm end to this arrangement, and if they don’t figure out their feelings by the time they get where they are going, it might be too late.

The Playlist by Morgan Elizabeth Zoe and her best friend came across the box of dreams they made as kids. Zoe’s life doesn’t look anything like her 10-year-old self envisioned. So she completely changes her life: quits her job, breaks up with her boyfriend, and hits the road. When Zander realizes that his little sister’s best friend is finally single at the same time he is, he works with her loved ones to plan an epic road trip, using the Love Story Bucket List Zoe made when she was little as his road map. On the road, Zander convinces Zoe to play along with ticking items off the list. But he hopes that he can move from play acting to real feelings.

Along for the Ride by Mimi Grace Jolene Baxter is trying to do better in her life. Her first good deed is agreeing to help her sister and brother-in-law move cross country. But when her dad flakes on her for an all-expenses-paid vacation, she has to take the trip with Jason Akana, the most annoying man alive. Jason isn’t thrilled about the situation either. The 16 hour drive turns into an overnight trip when they have car troubles and unplanned pit stops. This is not what either had planned. Also not planned? The chemistry and feelings sparking between them.

Have you enjoyed and savored picture books for years now, but you want to wear the big book pants now? Do books and novels without any pictures at all intimidate you a little? Do you want to find middle ground? Chapter books for 2nd graders are here to your rescue!

Chapter books are a great transition between picture books and more advanced reading. They are exciting, friendly, and filled with illustrations. But unlike picture books, they have a lot more words per page. They are also divided into tiny, digestible chapters that can be read in one sitting. A lot of chapter books are released as a part of a bigger series so you can get time to bond with the characters. You tend to feel fond of the characters and get invested in their story. They can be a wonderful way to help navigate home, school, and life by watching someone your age do so on the page.

The books in this list range from everyday events of a child’s life to learning science and even helping magical creatures together. What are you waiting for? Dive into this list of chapter books for 2nd graders to find your next favourite read!

Absolutely Alfie and the Furry Purry Secret by Sally Warner & Shearry Malone Alfie Jakes is on a playdate with her classmate Hanni. She wasn’t looking forward to it, but Hanni seems more fun than she thought. Alfie lights up when she meets Hanni’s cat, who just gave birth to kittens. Alfie really wants to take a lovely little gray kitten home, but her parents claim she’s allergic and have a ‘no pets’ policy. Alfie is convinced she’s outgrown it. She could ask her parents for permission or just take the kitty home and not let anyone know. But turns out her furry purry secret is pretty hard to hide. Read to know more.

Rock Star #1 (Jada Jones) by Kelly Starling Lyons & Vanessa Brantley Newton Jada Jones and her best friend used to obsess over rocks together until her friend moved away. Jada misses her friend and school doesn’t feel the same. But when Jada’s teacher announces the new class project about rocks and minerals, she feels a ray of excitement again. However, one of her teammates doesn’t seem to like her or her idea too much. Can Jada win the project competition along with a new friend?

Tarot cards have lingered on the edges of my imagination for several years. I was fascinated by how famous artists like Salvador Dali had made their own decks, drawing on their iconographic vocabularies. But recently, I came across a book that stopped me in my tracks: Claire McMillan’s recently released Alchemy of a Blackbird. Starting during World War II in Vichy France, the book tells the story of the friendship of artists Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, who were on the outskirts of the surrealist movement. Tarot is a vital center of the book, starting with Varo’s desire to learn to read the cards, and it is used in the structure of several chapters.

Previously, I had encountered tarot cards in fiction in Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973). In it, a group of travelers meet in a castle and later a tavern, but all have lost the power of speech. They must use tarot cards to tell each other their stories with the corresponding cards in the margins of the book.

Between Calvino and McMillan’s works, I became fascinated by the use of tarot cards as a device in fiction. So I decided to talk with McMillan and explore scholarship about Calvino’s work to find out more.

While the book is mostly told from the point of view of Varo, McMillan ends almost every other chapter from the perspective of a different character in that chapter. Each one is represented with a tarot card. She wrote Varo’s chapter first and then went back to think about what type of card related to the character or energy of the scene. Creating her own definitions for the cards was one of the hardest parts of the book for her.

Most people know the late Harry Belafonte as a singer, but he was so much more than that. Born March 1, 1927, to Jamaican immigrant parents in Harlem, his birth name was Harold George Bellanfanti, Jr. He was raised Catholic (his father was of Sephardic Jewish descent as well as Afro-Jamaican, but Judaism is passed through the maternal line) and grew up in Harlem as well as Jamaica, where he lived with his grandmother for several years and first heard the work songs he would later record. Back in New York, he dropped out of high school to join the Navy and serve in World War II.

After the war, he found work as a janitor and — according to his memoir, My Song — was given tickets to the American Negro Theater. He fell in love with the theater and also met Sidney Poitier, who was nine days older than him. The two became fast friends, training together and pooling their money to go to as many shows as possible; they would take turns using a single ticket to get in, each describing the act they had just watched to the other as they switched places.

In the late 1940s, Belafonte took acting classes with the New School as well as performing with the American Negro Theater. He worked as a nightclub singer to pay for his lessons, backed by the Charlie Parker band. His singing landed him a contract with RCA Records in 1953, and he recorded with them for over 20 years. His debut record, Calypso, was the first album ever to sell 1 million copies and included the song “Day-O,” AKA the Banana Boat Song, which he said is “about men who sweat all day long, and they are underpaid, and they’re begging the tallyman to come and give them an honest count — counting the bananas that I’ve picked, so I can be paid.”

It’s no surprise that Belafonte considered himself an activist first and an artist second. He was extremely political, campaigning for John F. Kennedy and for Lyndon B. Johnson’s reelection after he succeeded Kennedy — and later opposing George W. Bush and supporting Barrack Obama and Bernie Sanders. But he is best known for his work in the Civil Rights movement, alongside his friends Sidney Poitier and Martin Luther King Jr. He financed King’s activism, organized the Freedom March on Washington where King delivered the I Have a Dream speech, and he bailed King out of jail during the 1963 Birmingham campaign, which was when his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail was penned. He later organized “We Are the World,” performed at Live Aid, was a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, and campaigned to cure AIDS and raise awareness of prostate cancer, among other actions.

Somehow, he also found time to act, and a few of his films were bookish. His first movie, 1953’s Bright Road, was adapted from “See How They Run” by Mary Elizabeth Vroman and starred Dorothy Dandridge and a mostly Black cast. In 1970 he starred with Zero Mostel and Gloria Foster in The Angel Levine, based on a short story by Bernard Malamud. He appeared in 1992’s The Player, starring Tim Robbins and based on the book The Player by Michael Tolkin. And, in his final screen role, he appeared in BlacKkKlansman in 2018, based on Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth. (He also appeared in nearly everything directed by his friend Sidney Poitier.)

The other night, the performance artist Kembra Pfahler told me some top-drawer East Village Elizabeth Taylor lore: the dame crossed paths with the about-town character Dee Finley outside a needle exchange one afternoon and later paid for Finley to get an entire new set of teeth. A quick Google search when I got home revealed that the story, as reported by Michael Musto for the Village Voice, was not apocryphal: Finley recalls Taylor arriving by limo at the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center, circa 1997—“She had just had brain surgery. Her hair was short and blonde. Liz at her dykiest. YUM!” Taylor, who funded a lot of community work related to the AIDS crisis and had donated to the needle exchange, was apparently out and about that Thursday taking a tour to see what her dollars were doing, and also giving away bottles of her best-selling perfume White Diamonds; though Sophia Loren did it first, Taylor’s powdery Diamonds was what really made celebrity fragrances a thing. (Finley says he promptly flipped his freebie for a couple bags of junk.)

The poet and perfumer Marissa Zappas owns a pair of size thirty-eight brown leather kitten heels that once belonged to Taylor, who died in 2011. When I asked her if they smelled, she said, “Not really, vaguely of green peppers at first.” For Zappas, who’s carved out a niche for herself as an independent perfumer designing fragrances for book rollouts and art installations, as well as olfactory homages to historic figures like an eighteenth-century pirate, Taylor has been a lifelong obsession. She even used photos of her idol as visual aids to help her memorize smells when she was training to become a perfumer. Now, after establishing herself through collaborations with pros and internet-famous astrologers, Zappas has returned to Taylor as the inspiration for her latest scent, Maggie the Cat Is Alive, I’m Alive! Typical for Zappas, whose fragrances are more grown and nuanced than her millennial girlie #PerfumeTok fans might let on, Maggie starts off unassuming, with a warm floral musk as paradigmatically perfume-y as Grandma’s after-bath splash (it smells a bit like Jean Nate, to be specific—a summery drugstore staple since 1935). But then it develops into something more feral, a little loamy: like the inside of an empty can of Coke on a hot summer day, or freshly baked bread with a hint of wet limestone, maybe even an overripe peach traced with rot. As I lay around with my laptop in bed in the afternoon, the fragrance mixes with my sweat, its champagne and violets becoming nutty with a note as sharp as paint thinner.

The first ingredient in Maggie the Cat Is Alive, I’m Alive! is anisic aldehyde, a synthetic scent engineered to resemble anise seed. In its chemical structure, anisic aldehyde is somewhere between a compound that smells like vanilla and one approaching the scent of licorice. As Luca Turin explains in The Secret of Scent, modern perfumery was born in labs about a century ago, when synthetics produced to smell like lemons or roses began to replace natural extracts in fragrances. But aldehydes aren’t just one-to-one approximations of organic smells: “To understand what aldehydes do to perfumes, imagine painting a watercolor on Scotchlite, the stuff cyclists wear to be seen in car headlights,” Turin says. “Floral colors turn strikingly transparent on this strange background, at one opaque and luminous.” Aldehydes are incandescent, like Elizabeth Taylor, a delicate flower animated by something stranger, more wild. 

“Complexity is hard to define and easy to recognize,” Turin writes of perfumes. Taylor’s performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is instantly recognizable as that: frustrated and smoldering, yet defiantly vulnerable. The new perfume takes its name from one of her lines— “Maggie the cat is alive! I’m alive!”—spoken while pushing her avoidant husband (played by Paul Newman) to forget his recently deceased best friend and fuck her, God dammit. Maggie is desperate for his touch, Taylor convinces us with her leer, at least as much as she wants a baby to lock down his inheritance. One of the reasons we like the woman is that she’s candid about her maneuvers. She doesn’t feign any kind of moral high ground. And while she’s hardened in her determination, she’s soft enough, through Taylor’s piercing portrayal, not to hide how her husband’s neglect stings. A woman self-possessed but not uncorrupted, surrounded by all the fetid decay of a Mississippi plantation during a heat wave, willing to flirt a bit with her father-in-law, she’s a perfect Southern Gothic figure to be interpreted through perfume. Taylor playing her only makes it more fitting: Maggie the Cat Is Alive, I’m Alive! captures the stewing desire of a sex symbol unsexed. 

Soon it will be August in New York City, a period when everyone is theoretically out of town—they’re always saying this, anyway, in books like August by Judith Rossner. This is mostly a fiction, that everyone’s at their country house and everything is shutting down, but it’s sort of fun to imagine; who doesn’t secretly enjoy having fun while others are away? For the month of August, the Review is trying a little experiment—highlighting some things that are going on during this supposedly quiet month. Every week, we’ll be compiling roundups of cultural events and miscellany that the Review’s staff and friends are excited about around town. (And maybe, occasionally, out of town.) We can promise only that these lists will be uncomprehensive, totally random, and fun.

F. W. Murnau’s Faust, introduced by Mary Gaitskill at Light Industry, August 1: Gaitskill, who was interviewed for the Spring issue of the Review, will be introducing this 1926 silent film, which, like many flops, is now a cult classic. Gaitskill saw a clip of the film online years before she had read Goethe’s novel, though she knew the basic outlines of the story of the scholar who made a pact with the devil. “That was enough for me to understand and to feel, to believe, the reality of the segment: the flailing despair, the futile vanity, the experience of running through a live, tactile murk of demons and uncomprehending humans, moving slo-mo through their own fates, trying to undo something that can’t be undone,” she told Light Industry.

Heji Shin’s “The Big Nudes” at 52 Walker, open all August: “The Big Nudes” is the photographer Heji Shin’s first solo exhibition in New York since the 2020 show “Big Cocks.” The cocks in question, by the way, were a series of roosters photographed in shocking detail. “The Big Nudes,” meanwhile, will include photographs of pigs posed to evoke fashion models. This show comes recommended by our contributing editor Matthew Higgs, who says, “This relatively rare gallery presentation promises to be something of a midsummer event.” It opened recently and will be up through October 7.

“Live Jerry Garcia Band Set Lists” by the Garcia Project at Brooklyn Bowl, August 5: Recommended by friend of the Review and occasional Review softball first baseman Adam Wilson, this will be an attempt to faithfully re-create actual set lists played by the Jerry Garcia Band between 1976 and 1995. If you never had a chance to see Jerry’s soulful side project live, this is probably the closest you will ever come to it, and real Deadheads will tell you—at great length, if you’d like—that JGB is actually, sometimes, even better than the Dead.

He texted me something during staff meeting. I didn’t answer until it was over and I had closed my computer and wasn’t looking at him anymore, and then I told him not to text me, please, for these weeks, like we had said. Then I was upset, and I drove to the other side of the lake, where I parked outside a trailer. It was for work: my job required me to interview people, usually showing up unannounced to where it was possible they lived, or didn’t.

A teenage girl opened the door. She was wearing a hot pink sweatshirt with purple sleeves, and her dog was black or dark gray with white on its face. It didn’t make noise as it went around her legs in the doorframe. I turned around, and it bit into the back of my calf. I yelled for a while, and then I was on the ground. Nothing hurt. I put my finger in its mouth to get it to let go, but it bit it. I screamed louder until I realized there wasn’t a point to screaming, because the girl was already hitting the dog with something, maybe a chair, and there was no one else to alert.

Then I was free, and the door to their trailer was open, and then I was inside, and I had closed the door behind me. Then I was leaning on the arm of their green couch, and then I was sitting on the seat of another, whose color I don’t know, because I was looking at the small lakes of blood on the floor. They were already congealing, and inside the pools were small flecks of white. I realized they were my fat when I saw similar pieces on the thighs of my jeans.

I called him. I told him where I was and that I had been attacked by a dog. He said, “Mm-hmm,” in a light tone, the way he talked to his neighbor when he helped him with his taxes, or to me if I needed help with my computer. There was another girl inside the trailer then, maybe the same girl, and she was looking at me with her hand over her mouth. She asked me what to do, and I told her to call 911. She was upset but she did it.

My story in the Summer issue of the Review starts with a character receiving a letter from a boyfriend of twenty-five years ago, and one of the Review’s editors, in search of recommendations for this column, asked if I’d like to write about a piece of epistolary fiction that inspired me. I was pretty sure there wasn’t a particular inspiration, is the thing, and when the editor’s email arrived, I had a flu and a few degrees of fever, so I put her request aside and got back on my sofa and under my blanket, returning to The Demon Lover and Other Stories, which Elizabeth Bowen wrote during World War II. My husband gave me the book more than a decade ago, and for some reason, it was finally calling out to be read.

The first stories in the book are sketches of Londoners dislodged from their identities by aerial bombings. A recent New Yorker article about disaster care describes the small items of function and decoration in people’s lives—pencil sharpener, teakettle, photo in a frame—as the “furniture of self,” and many of Bowen’s characters find themselves feeling uncanny and disenchanted after the loss of items that once made up their context and setting. In the middle stories, Bowen goes at the problem from the other end, writing about people unsettled by the unexpected return of things that once gave them context. A woman inherits a skeleton clock that she is told she cared for passionately as a child but has no memory of. Another woman, in a nightclub on a boozy date, hears a dance tune that her father used to try to sing. And in the title story, “The Demon Lover,” a third woman, returning to her bomb-cracked, boarded-up house to rescue a few items, finds a letter from the man she was engaged to during World War I—twenty-five years prior. 

The coincidental resonance/overlap with my own short story was eerie. Maybe I had read this story before and repressed it, the way Bowen’s heroine represses the memory of her skeleton clock? I don’t think so, though I’m at the age where that can’t be ruled out. Maybe twenty-five years is just a resonant interval, for me as well as for Bowen—it’s the time it takes for youth to turn into middle age. It’s also roughly the gap between World War I and II, which may be why it reappears in story after story of hers. As the reader advances through the collection, her stories turn out—more and more explicitly—to be ghost stories. A woman two-timing her husband starts to feel “disliked” by a presence in her bedroom. In perhaps the most beautiful story, “The Happy Autumn Fields,” a woman dozing in a bomb-shattered building dreams of having been another person altogether, in another century, and can’t shake the sense that her dreamed self is her real one. 

In a postscript to the collection, Bowen writes about why the past seemed more vivid during World War II—why it haunted the present—and her language is weirdly evocative of what it felt like to live through COVID. “In war-time many people had strange deep intense dreams,” she writes. 

Last night I had a dream that Kim Kardashian and I were planning a lunch for a whole bunch of people. I have no idea who those people were. I just know that Kim and I had to plan a lunch together, a small one, maybe a lunch that would serve as a planning session for a second, larger lunch. It is my suspicion that in this dream I was working as a publicist, which serves me right, because I have been short with a few publicists in my life, though I do love a good publicist and appreciate that I myself would not be a good publicist. But in this dream I seemed to be holding my own.

Kim and I talked on the phone for a long time, making plans, debating salads, sandwiches, “small plates,” and the amounts of each that we needed. What would people drink? How many different canned or bottled drinks did we need? We said “uh-huh” and “mmmm” a lot. I was intensely bored but also aware that I was talking to Kim Kardashian. I could see Kim in my dream even though I was talking to her on a landline, a situation where you do not see the person you’re talking to. I was in the dream and watching it too.

I should have known I was in a dream because both of our phones were old-fashioned ones, with long coiled plastic cords. Kim’s phone was avocado green, mine bright yellow. Both of the phones in my house growing up—one attached to the kitchen wall, and one the kind you could walk around with, with an extra long cord, that was stationed in my parents’ bedroom—were white or off-white.

 

Let’s start with the dark stuff. On Saturday night in San Francisco, after the second-to-last-ever Dead & Co. show, every single ATM near the ballpark was apparently out of cash, because people couldn’t stop buying balloons filled with nitrous oxide, huffing them on the street for just a few more seconds of feeling high. The bars nearby were overrun, quite literally, long after everyone should have been at home. People go down at shows—it happened right in front of us one night, the medics rushing in and carrying someone out. There are, not infrequently, overdoses. There is too much of everything, sometimes. “I’m at that point in a bender where beer isn’t really doing anything for me anymore,” I heard someone joke on day three of the three-show run.

It is not that easy to drink yourself to death, actually, which I know because I have watched a lot of people try, but I could imagine it happening to many people in the context of the long slide of years or decades spent following the band. I always think “There but for the grace of God go I,” and I really mean it. So many people are dead and gone, among them the Dead’s lead songwriter, guitarist, and singer Jerry Garcia, who was killed by his own addiction to heroin at the age of fifty-three. “Do you think of Jerry as a prophet or a saint?” my friend asked me on Sunday as we got ready for the last show ever. The mood was elegiac, though the fact of finality wasn’t really sinking in, which might be why we kept repeating it over and over. “I can’t believe it’s really the last one,” someone said, not for the first time. “What are we even going to do next summer?” my friend lamented. “Are we going to like … have to get really into Phish?” “We are NOT getting into Phish,” someone else insisted, though we all agreed we would probably go see Phish at Madison Square Garden in August.

We put on our last clean Dead T-shirts—we were all running low and trading with one another—and headed back to the ballpark. A few of us had decided last minute to upgrade our tickets so we could be on the floor. I had never been on the floor for a Dead & Co. show; we always don’t spend the extra money and regret it later, so this time, one last time, we were not going to make that mistake. I said I wanted to hear “Bertha,” and we got it, right away, and right away we knew that every single member of the band was completely on, locked in. Bobby, as my friend observed, was “really cooking.” Jeff Chimenti, Oteil Burbridge, Mickey Hart, also cooking. And Mayer—I have never seen him, perhaps, cook like that, leaning into every moment harder than I have ever seen him lean, and he always leans in hard, given that he is probably among other things one of the greatest living guitarists.

We went to the lot. The lot, my younger brother observed—he was a first-time Dead & Co. show attendee—was “literally just a parking lot.” In fact it was a parking lot adjacent to the Port of San Francisco and near the SFPD headquarters, where I used to go for press conferences when I was a crime reporter. It was a vast parking lot, not far from the stadium where the second-to-last Dead & Co. show was going to start in two hours, and it was full of Deadheads.

The lot is the scene outside every show, known colloquially as Shakedown Street. It’s more or less an open-air drug market, that phrase that gets thrown around a lot to describe other parts of San Francisco; it is also the locus of the vestiges of real hippie culture. There is nothing like it anywhere else. There are vans that have been on the road for months, vans painted with psychedelic mushrooms, vans covered in stickers that say “Make America Grateful Again” and “Thank you Bobby.” People sell T-shirts, an endless array of T-shirts in every imaginable version of tie-dye. People sell quesadillas. People sell nitrous oxide—lots of it; in fact, the unmistakable hiss of nitrous and the constant popping of balloons is one of the most disconcerting features of being outside a Dead show. People sell funny hats. People sell, confusingly, a lot of rocks. I saw a sign next to a big box of rocks that said BUY 1 GET 1 FREE.

Being on the lot is basically just about wandering around and looking at stuff, so that’s what we did. One of my friends wanted to get a new Online Ceramics Dead T-shirt; another one wanted to buy a tiny ceramic mushroom to hold during the concert. My brother and I weaved in and out of some stalls, looking at shirts and stickers that said things like “Not like other girls” and “5-8-1977 was an inside job.”

“There was this apple last night that I was eating and I couldn’t stop eating it, I even ground up the seeds and then I think I was worried that I had arsenic in my body, so I got a bit disturbed during ‘Space,’ ” I heard one guy telling his friend, bent over a camping stove where he was frying some onions and nursing a beer.

Walking into a Dead & Company show is more or less how you imagine it would be: there are nearly forty thousand people converging on a baseball stadium wearing some of the worst outfits you have ever seen in your life. “This is really a lot of different types of white people, huh?” a first-time attendee said as we walked into the show at San Francisco’s Oracle Park (formerly AT&T Park, SBC Global Park, and PacBell Park.) On the street, a white guy with dreadlocks offered us mushrooms. Another white guy with dreadlocks held up a sign that said, “Cash, grass, or ass—I’ll take it all.” A friend, stunned by the famous Northern California fog, bought an ugly tie-dye sweatshirt at a makeshift stand outside the stadium for seventy-eight dollars.

It was the first night of a three-night run of the final shows for this iteration of the Grateful Dead—the last tour ever, the last shows ever, though, as everyone knows, the Grateful Dead has been ending for nearly twenty years. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, everyone thought that was the end. In 2015, many of the original band members played a tour that was literally called “Fare Thee Well.” And yet, miraculously, it continued. But this time: Bob Weir is seventy-five, and John Mayer, the unlikely force behind this version of the band, has other things to get on to. At the very least, this is probably the last time they’ll ever sell out huge stadiums. So this was a major event that I had flown out from New York to see with five friends. I had been hearing for days that SFO was “like Bonnaroo for Deadheads.” On another friend’s flight in, the pilot told them they were flying over a wildfire in Colorado. “Wow, it’s literally ‘Fire on the Mountain,’ ” someone behind her said.

In line, everyone checked out the scene, craning their necks to see how good other people’s tie-dyes were. One guy was wearing a cape.

“Is that Andy Cohen?” someone asked.

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This week’s book censorship news post begins with highlighting the results of the author survey on the financial impact they have experienced due to book bans. Because the results were lengthy, that was put into a separate post which is linked here and in the image below. Go dig into those, then come back to this week’s roundup of book censorship news.

We need more stories highlighting what the nonstop book banning and legislated bigotry are doing to the librarians in these positions. A worthwhile read from a school librarian in Utah.“The number of people filing complaints and appeals on books in Greeley-Evans schools [CO] represents less than 1% of the total number of voters who participated in a District 6 ballot issue late last year.” More journalism like this, too, please. The “culture war” is a fake lead because it is not a culture war. It is a small, minuscule minority creating a lot of nonsense.Stamped will be put back on shelves in Pickens County Schools (SC).Meanwhile in New Hanover County School District (NC), Stamped was challenged then approved. That decision is now being appealed.The Old Lyme Public Library (CT) will keep You Know, Sex: Bodies, Gender Puberty and Other Things and Let’s Talk About it: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships and Being a Human in the teen section of the public library. Where they belong.Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools (NC) continues to hear from Moms for Liberty about the need to ban books throughout the district. Maybe the district should not have invited them for a one-on-one meeting last fall to hear them out. Now Moms think they own the district.“In the waning days of LGBT Pride Month, Clovis City Councilwoman Diane Pearce posted a message on Facebook that she called a ‘public service announcement.’ It warned about LGBT books at the local library.” Here’s your fascism, once again in California.Remember the time a full-grown adult was attempting to break into school libraries in Iredell-Statesville, North Carolina to take photos of the books that she claimed were naughty? (Yes, she’s a Moms member). Well, the district is still dealing with this and turns out, they ban books whenever there is as much as a complaint: “Greg Mueller of Mooresville said he appreciated what progress Mimnaugh and others have made in having books removed from schools in Iredell County but questioned the progress. He proposed that any book that was brought into question by parents be removed from schools while it is evaluated. Superintendent Dr. Jeff James said more than 250 books had been asked to be reviewed by adults. He said books are removed during the evaluation process.” Nice parental grooming of a kid in this one, too.Ludlow School’s board proposed a book ban for the district, and now a Massachusetts senator is trying to step in and stop it.Picture books are not a new target in the book banning effort — they’ve been a big part of it since the beginning of this particular two+ year endeavor. But it’s a worthwhile Washington Post piece regardless, if you’re not paywalled.There is a petition trying to get the librarian who put up a June Pride display at the Athens Public Library (TN) fired from the job.“According to Heger, books like The 57 Bus won’t stop bullying in schools of LGTBQ students, as that is a cultural problem for the school. However, she worries that books like The 57 Bus, which focuses on a non-binary student being set on fire while on a bus and their journey of gender identity, will encourage students to use gender pronouns and potentially identify themselves with the ‘attractive’ LGBTQ lifestyle.” Whether or not The 57 Bus remains a choice book in West Bend High School Junior English classes (WI) will be determined later this month. The complainer doesn’t have kids in the school and doesn’t think the book should even be a *choice* to read. You know, though, not book banning since kids can get the book on Amazon.The Kite Runner is also under fire in the West Bend School District (WI) and yes, our parent without kids in the school is involved.Friends of the Caro Library (MI) are helping raise money to protect the board members who are being pushed for recall. Why are they being recalled, you ask? Because the bigots don’t like that they won’t ban books.After throwing chicken feed at the book review committee, Beaufort County Schools (SC) might not allow the individual to attend more meetings. I don’t know, y’all. One side is defending the rights of LGBTQ+ and BIPOC folks and the other is throwing chicken feed.“A Columbia County judge has sided with the Columbia County School District saying a parent’s opt-out of the school’s sexual education program does not require schools to keep materials related to sexuality out of the hands of her child.” It’s wild. The “we don’t coparent with the government” contingent expects the “government schools” to parent for them. This judge says it does not work that way.Moms for Liberty wants LGBTQ+ books labeled at the Billings Public Library (MT), which is in direct opposition to what libraries do. Libraries do not label beyond (potentially) genre stickers.This is a big deal, given this library’s history, but the Public Library of Enid (OK) will allow an LGBTQ+ history display in October.Bartholomew County Public Library (IN) did a huge audit of their teen section after fielding complaints about the usual suspects, including demands to move some of the teen books to “more appropriate” sections. Turns out, books are where they should be and oh, they don’t have enough LGBTQ+ books there, either.A North Carolina county attempted to take control over their public library. It did not go well, and the reason they wanted to take it over will (absolutely not) shock you: “[C]ommission chairman Jeff Whitson made a motion to begin the process of taking over the library system and making it completely county-operated. He said the purpose was to ensure that there was no bias shown to any religious, political, or ethnic platform. The motion was tabled and sparked a heated debate as many residents believed the motion was in response to the library’s Pride display in June.” (Update: the motion did not pass!).An update on our pal Gavin Downing in Kent, Washington, as he prepares for another school year resisting book bans.Unpregnant will be under review with the Nixa School Board (MO) once again.A new bill in North Carolina is a book banner and public school hater’s dream, wherein leaders can be removed easily and librarians can be prosecuted.I am paywalled for this story, and that’s unfortunate since it’s also (what passes for good) news. The Indian Valley Public Library (PA) will not be defunded over LGBTQ+ books.I had no idea since 2021 that over 20 books had been banned or censored in the Waukesha School District (WI).Under a new proposal in Hempfield Area Schools (PA), who cares about expertise? “Potential new books coming into Hempfield Area School District libraries could first be reviewed by the public before going on school shelves.” Cool.It’s not just the U.S. dealing with all of this. In parts of Canada, it’s been brutal, and that’s been especially true in the South Central Regional Library in Manitoba. They’ve dealt with the crisis actors and the city council just found a solution: appoint some of themselves to the library board to ensure the dirty books aren’t in the kids section. “The City’s resolution instructs their two appointed board members to exert influence as members of the SCRL Board of Directors to create a policy, whereby graphically sexually explicit books be moved from the children’s section to another section of the library as appropriate so that children will not stumble across them, but they remain available to parents who wish to use them as an educational resource.” That’s not how this works.The Oconee County Library Board of Trustees (SC) voted to remove the YA book Flamer from the YA section and move it to the adult section. That…is still censorship.10 of the 30 folks who showed up at the Yankton, South Dakota, public library board meeting spoke about the library’s Pride month display. Most spoke in favor of it. Y’all, keep this up.Finally, let’s go back to Canada for a moment. They released their country’s most banned books of 2022 — noting, too, the largest uptick they’ve seen. Top of the list? Gender Queer. You’ll see some U.S. favorites here and some new ones, sure to start causing crisis preparations from the bigot contingent soon.

In early June, I distributed an author survey to gauge the impact of book bans on authors. The survey specifically sought to look at where or how school and library visit invitations have changed since 2021 — the first year this wave of book bans really caught fire. Are authors seeing their incomes decrease? Are they seeing fewer invites to speak to students out of fear of the content their books include? The results are in.

It is worth noting that this survey had 25 responses. This is significantly more than the agent survey earlier this year, though it is in no way able to represent the population of authors; it can’t even represent the population of authors writing the kinds of books being challenged, censored, and banned right now. The author survey reached an even bigger audience of potential respondents than the agent survey did, and both saw wide distribution through new and legacy industry channels. That said, this array of responses is likely indicative of trends happening more broadly and by those who are writing the kinds of books being targeted.

All survey takers were able to remain anonymous, so commentary will be without attribution. Chances are what was stated, though, represents common themes seen by both the other survey takers and the broader kid lit author world in the U.S. It is worth noting that open-ended questions yielded much smaller response pools, evident as you read through the results.

Because some of the questions were cut off in the graphics produced from the survey, I have duplicated them in full above the response.

Due to the length of this survey, note that this week’s book censorship news roundup is in a separate post. You can access it here, and you’ll also be linked to that post at the conclusion of this one.

Summer is in full swing — in some parts dangerously so — and if you need a break from the heat/terrible air quality but want to feel connected to others, may I suggest a book club? All but one of the below book clubs are virtual and they offer the flexibility of participating as little or as much as you’d like, which is always a win-win. Plus, you can always just peruse this as a list to select your next read from and/or pile more books onto your to-be-read list.

This month we didn’t have multiple book clubs pick the same book, ending that fun streak, but one book club did pick the book chosen twice last month, this month! A sign of a perfect book club choice? Yes, yes it is! (Spoiler: it’s the bright yellow one!)

Once again we did have a month with great picks for all reading tastes! If you’re looking for nonfiction and memoir you have different options. There are two romance books, one for a Latine romance book club pick and one for a Jewish book club pick. A sci-fi that recently made waves on Twitter, just before Twitter really started imploding (talk about timing!). A contemporary that flips the romance genre question of “will they” into “should they,” along with a humorous contemporary summer read. Thriller fans have a book, literary fans have two options, and there’s a popular contemporary that reads like a literary thriller. Enjoy all the great choices!