SCPL Reads: Freedom to Read Week 2026

The tragic story of two itinerant ranch hands on the run--one is the lifelong companion to the other, a developmentally disabled man.

Challenge: In 1994, a Member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta lobbied to have "profane and irreligious books" removed from Alberta school libraries, citing Of Mice and Men as an example.

Accompanied by her shape-shifting daemon, Lyra Belacqua sets out to prevent her best friend and other kidnapped children from becoming the subject of gruesome experiments in the Far North.

Challenge: In 2007, Ontario’s Halton Catholic District School Board voted to ban Philip Pullman’s trilogy of fantasy novels – The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass – from its schools. The board objected to “atheist” themes in the British author’s books.

The story of a young woman who journeys from the carelessness of childhood through an uneasy adolescence in search of love and sexual experience.

Challenge: In 1976, a high school principal in Peterborough, Ont., removed this novel from the Grade 13 reading list. The principal “‘questioned its suitability’ because of the explicit language and descriptions of sex scenes."

Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity--what it means and how to think about it--for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.

Challenge: In 2023, the Prairie Rose School District in Alberta received complaints at two successive meetings claiming that the work, along with several others, constituted as too intimately graphic under the Criminal Code of Canada.

The Handmaid's Tale books portray a dystopian near future in a country called Gilead, which previously was the United States. Women's roles have been very narrowly defined and are strictly regulated according to principles based on a particular interpretation of the Bible. Gilead is a totalitarian state ruled by a small number of men.

Challenge: In 2008, a parent in Toronto complained about the use of this dystopian novel in his son’s Grade 12 English class due to the novel’s “profane language,” anti-Christian overtones and themes of “violence” and “sexual degradation.” In 2009, a review panel of the Toronto District School Board recommended that the novel be kept in the curricula for Grades 11 and 12. The Handmaid’s Tale remained on Grade 12 reading lists.

An easy-to-grasp picture book, exploring questions relating to gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexism.

Challenge: In 2023, a group of 90 parents attended a local public library board meeting in Dayton, WA, USA, demanding the removal of several children’s books from the library shelves including Pink, Blue, and You! which was called out by activists for promoting “lies and false genders.” In response, the National Assembly of Québec passed a motion in support of Gravel, declaring that such censorship “has no place either in art or in democracy.”

Set in Halifax, Nova Scotia during the First World War, Barometer Rising juxtaposes a drama of family loyalties and tensions against the actual historical event of the devastating explosion of a French munitions ship in Halifax harbor.

Challenge: At a convention in 1960, members of the Manitoba School Trustees Association voted unanimously to ask Manitoba’s department of education to remove this novel from the high school curriculum, objecting to is the vulgarity and the language used in it. Most trustees had not read the novel.

Morag Gunn grows up in a small town on the Canadian prairie, escapes from an unhappy marriage, and returns to rural Canada in hopes of coming to terms with the past.

Challenge: In 1976, Rev. Sam Buick and school board trustee Jim Telford of Peterborough, Ont., led an effort to remove The Diviners from local school curricula, complaining that the novel “reeked of sordidness.” In reaction to the censorship efforts, the Canadian Library Association, the Books and Periodicals Council, and several other organizations joined forces to form the Freedom of Expression Committee – a group committed to defending the right to read. Their activities included organizing the first Freedom to Read Week in 1984.

Rose and her parents have been going to Awago Beach since she was little, and Rose always meets her younger friend Windy. But this summer is different: Rose's parents keep arguing, and altogether it's a summer of secrets and heartaches.

Challenge: In 2016, after receiving a parent’s complaint, school officials removed this Canadian graphic novel from a library in Minnesota. The book, which won a Governor General’s Literary Award for illustration in children’s literature in 2014, tells the story of two girls beginning adolescence. The school superintendent, librarian and principal thought that the topics in the book were “inappropriate for inclusion in the library” and that the language was “inappropriate.”