Torres’ slim wonder of a book isn’t primarily a YA novel, though I do think it perfectly appropriate for Young Adults as well as Regular Adults.

Walter Dean Myers’ Monster takes the other side, telling the story of the trial a black teenager who is accused of participation in a violent crime. The thing everything remembers about To Kill a Mockingbird is the trial-when Atticus Finch decides to defend a young black man accused of rape. Shades of “Boo” Radley here-or at least the idea of him-as well as a story that echoes To Kill a Mockingbird‘s values of kindness, compassion, and standing up for yourself and others.

The protagonist of this novel, Auggie, is a middle-schooler with a facial deformity, who heads into the shark-infested waters of private after years of home schooling. (There’s a larger conversation about how we stick to all books recognized in the canon to the detriment of more contemporary fare in general, but we’ll leave it there for now.) So here are a few relatively recent novels that all touch on some of the same themes as To Kill a Mockingbird-like social inequality, justice, and plain old growing up-and that I at least wouldn’t be sorry to see taught in more schools. This isn’t to knock To Kill a Mockingbird, but part of getting kids to become lifelong readers is giving them books they can relate to at a young age-and maybe, in 2016, Harper Lee’s examination of morality and race in Great Depression-era Alabama isn’t that relatable. It’s better to have our eyes open than closed.īut the news made me think-why exactly are we we still clinging so hard to To Kill a Mockingbird in our classrooms? It’s a great work of literature, of course, but surely there are other novels out there, novels that might be just as compelling and instructive for young readers-or even more so. Any book can be taught in schools as long as teachers are willing to have conversations with children about their context-we don’t live in a vacuum here. Now, for the record, banning books is ridiculous. “There is so much racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that, and right now we are a nation divided as it is,” Marie Rothstein-Williams said. Recently, a school in Virginia removed copies of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from classrooms-and the county is considering banning them completely-after a complaint by a mother citing the racist language they contain.

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