Win the Entire, Original, UnCensored Blue Hen Reading List for Summer 2014!

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I might do to make very clear that the “solution” to fixing the Cape Henlopen school board’s ill-informed, intolerant, hasty removal of The Miseducation of Cameron Post from the Blue Hen reading list on the grounds that it has too much “inappropriate language”—given that it has now been (resoundingly) emphasized to that board that several of the other books on the list have similar language—is ABSOLUTELY NOT to remove those other books, too.

Attempting to fix a hasty act of censorship with more censorship would be, as I said in my letter to the members of the Cape Henlopen school board, a fucking travesty. 

Especially because, as I was reminded on facebook today, other books on that very list (Eleanor and Park and The Fault in Our Stars among them), have also  been subject to their own completely unreasonable and intolerant and misguided censorship experiences.

Which is, in fact, one of the exact reasons why the Cape Henlopen school board’s rational for removing Cam Post from the Blue Hen list is just so obviously suspect: other books on the very same list have recently been censored and challenged due to their “offensive” language, and yet, the Cape Henlopen school board has very strangely singled-out The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and only The Miseducation of Cameron Post, for removal on those grounds. It just doesn’t add up.

But now that the board is clearly aware of this, I can think of nothing that would be more heartbreaking and plainly wrong than if they attempt to censor additional books, too. (And some of the board members have already emailed vague threats about doing just that.)

I want to celebrate ALL of the books on the original, uncensored 2014 Blue Hen summer reading list—just the way those dedicated, informed librarians in Delaware originally intended. I think, really, it’s a pretty kick-ass list in terms of the range of YA books represented. I’m honored, truly, that Cam Post was included on it (well, originally, anyway).

So what I’m gonna do is give away every single book on that list to one  reader. The whole list—every book—shipped to you. I’ll ask the good folks at Browseabout Books (in the Cape Henlopen area) to help me out with the logistics of this.

And those books are:

The Fault in Our Stars—John Green

Butter—Erin Jade Lange

Daughter of Smoke & Bone—Laini Taylor

The Scorpio Races—Maggie Stiefvater

March--John Lewis

If You Find Me—Emily Murdoch

More Than This—Patrick Ness

Eleanor and Park—Rainbow Powell

Boxers--Gene Luen Yang and Lark Pien

The Miseducation of Cameron Post—emily m. danforth

The copy of The Miseducation of Cameron Post will be signed (and I’ll work on maybe getting a few of the other books signed too—more updates on that, later).

All you have to do to enter is to use your twitter account (easiest for tech-challenged me to track and collate) to explain, in not very many characters, why you want/need these books. Use the hashtag #LeaveTheBlueHenListAlone so that I can find your entry. (The limited character count is part of the challenge.) And you have to do this by next Friday, July 11th. Feel free to tweet about this as many times as you’d like—the more entries the better.

I’ll compile all the entries and find some completely random way (I promise) of choosing a winner.

That’s it.

Let’s celebrate this awesome list of books and the librarians who came up with it. The whole thing—uncensored—just as they intended.