Educators of Alamogordo High School have removed a Neil Gaiman Neverwhere from their required reading list. The author sent a message out on Twitter and asked, “is anyone fighting back?”
According to The Guardian, this New Mexico school removed the book after one student’s mother complained that the book contains “sexual innuendos and harsh language.”
Gaiman recently delivered a lecture at the Reading Agency on the importance of libraries, reading, and daydreaming. During one portion of his speech, he denounces censorship and declares that “there are no bad authors for children.”
Here’s an excerpt from that talk:
“I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was R.L. Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy. It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness.”
Correction: An earlier edition of this post misstated the name of the novel.