by: Michelle Carr
Which one, out of all the banned books, has changed your life the most? I found this question incredibly difficult to answer as there have been a great many banned books that have impacted my life. The earliest one that I can think of probably would be one of the most frequently banned or challenged books, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.
My first interaction with this book was in the sixth grade when my very conservative Christian church began talking of the evils of this book. Many of my fellow young peers in the church had been assigned this book as a class read book in school. My church had gotten wind of this through the parents and there was an outrage growing that led to our pastor addressing it in a sermon. His sermon educated us on it’s evils. This book had satanic themes like opening your mind and clearing it of thoughts, which everyone knew to be the way the devil planted thoughts in your head. Discussions of themes of science and Christianity were simply not tolerated. This could lead to questions. There were ideas that clearly veered to a path away from our beliefs. They feared the powers the characters had in the book that were believed to be magical. We all knew that all magic came from the devil. Our parents were strongly encouraged to not allow us to participate in the class reading of this book. It was the work of the devil and would lure us in.
I cannot tell you how many sermons revolved around why the themes in this book were so bad. But I can tell you that as the youngest person in my sixth grade class, for the first time ever, I was frightened of a book. I was a lover of books even at that age and couldn’t understand how a book could be so dangerous. I had so many questions. All the adults around me told me not to question just to follow, they knew what was best. So after listening week after week about how bad this book was, I too began to fear it. What if my curiosity of the adventure that its pages held became my gateway into leading a life of the Devil’s bidding? If clearing one’s mind of all thoughts was so bad, then what protected me when I went to sleep every night and tried to shut out the thoughts of the day? Looking back, I’m pretty sure that this fear played a key role in the insomnia that I experienced during that time as well.
At some point, I stopped worrying so much about this book. I began reading other books with similar themes of magic and for a long time would feel that familiar twinge of anxiety lurking in the edges of my brain. This feeling became fainter as my knowledge grew. I began to embrace the findings of science instead of fearing the things that I learned simply because they would prove the things that I had blindly held faith in, to be impossible. Without having read the book, I began to embrace some of the very thoughts from the book that my childhood church had declared to be so evil.
In 2018, the discussion of this book began again as it would now be in movie form. I, myself, am now the mother of a twelve and a nine-year-old. I found myself staring at a copy of this book again and feeling the faint anxiety. But instead of letting the fear take over, I chose to break the cycle and purchase it as a gift for my oldest. I would let them decide. They read it and I finally read it. I found myself wondering why the themes of love and triumph of good over evil weren’t ever mentioned to me when I was a kid. I took my kids to see the movie and my oldest declared that the movie was so much better because the book had been quite complicated. But overall, we were in love with the strength and growth of the female main character Meg.
I look back now at all the heroic female characters that I have loved throughout my life. Each one has shaped me in different ways. I wonder now how Meg’s journey would have affected me had I discovered her in sixth grade as my friends had. Would I have questioned things earlier and moved quicker into the person that I grew into being? Would I have held more courage as I began to grow away from the thoughts of my childhood? Would I have known that I held more power within myself to create change than I had believed to be possible? Perhaps. But at least those are questions my children won’t have to wonder. I shared my story about the book with them and encouraged them to not fear books or the thoughts held in them. Change and growth can be scary, but it becomes a little less frightening when you don’t feel so alone even if it’s a dark and stormy night.
