I hadn’t read the book that would become embroiled in controversy at Gardner Edgerton school board meetings this Fall before I covered the fight between parents and administrators over the content of its pages.

Board members voted to keep the book as part of the district’s required reading for sophomore English classes at their October meeting.

I decided to finally make time, while being laid up from surgery recovery, to read the book that has been debated throughout the country’s schools for what has been labeled “questionable content.”

As a journalist and advanced reader from an early age, book banning has never been my thing. Are there books that I think aren’t age appropriate? Absolutely. Are there books that I think are complete garbage? Sure. Growing up in the Olathe School District in the 1980s and 1990s, I was forced to read books I am happy I never have to touch again. I hated Wuthering Heights so much I wrote a passionate book report about how much I hated it for my Sophomore Honors English Class. I was given an A.

It was also during my high school years, I spent a Summer at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for a missionary project with my Catholic Youth Group.

Parts of this book reminded me of both the hope and despair I witnessed personally and experienced through the residents’ eyes. We painted the school, repaired homes, spent time with elementary age kids, cooked and assisted with any odd jobs asked of us. I cried uncontrollably over the baby graves we visited at Wounded Knee.

The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and Oglala Lakota County is the poorest county in the United States. It was established at more than 2.8 million acres in 1889 as Camp 334 for indigenous prisoners of war as white colonists forged west scooping up more land to expand the country.

The Oglala Lakota tribe, members of the Sioux, earn an average yearly income of less than $9,000 a year.

The main character Arnold Spirit “Junior” reminded me repeatedly of the kids I met and mentored on the Reservation that Summer.

Junior, a fourteen-yearold teenage boy, lives on a reservation in Spokane, Washington and struggles with his Native American identity, life as a teenage boy, growing up surrounded by alcoholics and trying to find his place in the world.

I grew up as a scrawny, white blonde lower middle class kid in the richest county in Kansas. While some of Junior’s struggles weren’t relatable for me as a now almost 42 year old woman, some struggles probably hit a wide swath of teenage groups who will read the book. Even for my teenage self as a kid from a hard working lower middle class family who left Chicago to give their children better opportunities in the same way Junior’s parents let him change schools. I, also, imagine many boys’ could relate to the character’s insecurities of puberty from a young male perspective.

Many of the themes revolve around racism, poverty, despair, identity, belonging and the importance of dreams, hope and friendship.

Junior feels trapped between his home life and culture and wanting to pursue more for himself so he doesn’t get sucked into the hopelessness he experiences daily around him through his community.

He decides one day in order to give himself better opportunities for his future he needs to leave the reservation and attend school at the “white” school.

Junior uses humor sprinkled throughout to display the stereotypes he experiences toward himself from his new teachers and classmates and to battle and dissolve his own stereotypes toward people who do not live on the Reservation. It is his teenage crude humor that has come into question making the book one of the Top Ten most challenged books of all time since its 2007 debut.

The book is sexually prolific and derogatory at times and is sprinkled throughout the story, mostly towards the beginning. Do teenage boys think this way? Do they talk to each other this way? Unfortunately, they probably do. I have a younger brother who was a crude teenage boy once with crude teenage male friends.

This past year after a parent complained about the book’s phrasing and content, it was taken off the freshman required reading list and Derby Middle School library shelves in Derby, Kansas.

Should the book be banned? I’m not so sure, as I stated earlier I don’t believe in book banning, especially as a journalist and strong proponent for free speech, but should it be required reading, I’m not so sure about that either.

The themes and messages of the book are relatable and told in a way that probably resonate with kids more in our modern times then the classics I was forced to read growing up.

I had flashbacks to a childhood movie I grew up on, “Field of Dreams,” where Kevin Costner’s character Ray and his wife Annie Kinsella attend a book banning discussion at their local school board meeting. Annie brings the crowd to her side with an impassioned speech about the place Iowa used to be— filled with people who believe in love, justice, peace and understanding and their place in schools. She reminds them that they live in a country founded on individualism and freedom, and they do not want to return to the Nazi Germany 1933 era of book burnings or the authoritarian regimes of Stalin.

And while I’m also reminded of John Lithgow’s speech to his congregation burning books in the movie Footloose, “Evil doesn’t lie in these books. It lies here in our hearts,” and agree that students should be taught critical thinking more to decide their own hearts and minds with the information they receive, I think we can tell meaningful stories to our children without crude and sexually graphic humor or gay slurs.