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If you’re interested, you can read an interview with me about SCARS being challenged, & me being a survivor, as part of the SCARS paperback blog tour. You can also enter to win a paperback copy of SCARS (scroll down to the bottom of the interview to enter).

Chris Crutcher’s book Angry Management has been removed from a summer reading program because ONE angry parent decided that, after “reading” the first twenty-four pages, it had too much profanity. Yeah, you read that right. That offends me on so many levels. One parent gets to decide for the entire summer reading program, not just his kid? Based on only the first twenty-four pages–where swearing fit the context and the characters going through hard lives? And please–teens are not new to swearing, and there is so much on TV and movies alone. Why go after a book that gets the reader inside the character and offers insight?

I LOVE Chris Crutcher’s response–to send five copies of Angry Management to the local library near where the book was removed. You go, Chris! Smart teens will still access his book, and decide for themselves whether it appeals to them or not. And I think it will.

This is another book that is going on my to-read pile, now. I hope it’ll go on yours, too.

The wonderful Maureen Johnson, who started the #YASaves movement on Twitter in response to Meghan Cox Gurdon’s WSJ article that slammed so many good books (including Scars) will be on NPR TODAY at 11am EST!! I hope some people will call in to support her!

The radio show is here: http://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/

And that is a CALL IN show. The number is 1-888-477-9499.

HOW to be a caller on the show: http://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/how-to-be-a-caller-on-radio-times/

If you don’t get NPR locally, here is the LIVESTREAM: http://www.whyy.org/91FM/live.html

You can hear it live streaming here:

You go, Maureen!! I am so very grateful for strong, reasonable voices like Maureen, who know that YA books make a positive difference in teens’ lives. And that if a book doesn’t work for you, personally, just put it down!

You may have read about the recent snafu with Amazon.com–where thousands of lesbian and gay books lost their sales rankings, which made them hard to find via a search. This included picture book Heather Has Two Mommies, and YA book The Filly.

Many writers and concerned readers wrote in to Amazon, and got elusive replies, or replies that stated that they were excluding “adult material” from their lists. Lesbian/gay books are not “adult material”–they are necessary literature! And if they were indeed doing that, it’s a form of censorship.

Later, after Amazon realized that scope of the problem, they said that it was a “glitch in its sales ranking feature” and that there is “no new adult policy”.

Twitter had lively, frequent discussions about this, especially with the tag #amazonfail. Some people thought that Amazon was deliberately removing the books, being homophobic, and creating censorship, while some people thought that it was indeed a technological error, and that cataloging is subjective.

I’m grateful that many people rose up to complain to Amazon, since otherwise this “glitch” may have just continued, or stayed the same, with lesbian/gay books being hard to find through searching. Instead, after so many people rose up to protest, Amazon took action, corrected the problem, and apologized: “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” that pertained to 57,310 listings.

I am very glad that Amazon has corrected the issue–and so glad that people protested, which caused Amazon to respond. I still don’t know what the real story is, or what to believe. I know that technological errors can happen, though I think that Amazon’s initial response should have been better. Whatever the cause, I’m just glad that it’s over, and that those lesbian/gay books are now easy to find once again on Amazon.

What do you think? Was it censorship or a technological glitch?