Plea of 12-Year-Old Restores Blubber
to School Library
After hearing a seventh-grader defend the worth of Judy Blume's 1983 novel Blubber, the Limestone County, Alabama, school board has decided to reverse its October 20 removal of the book from school-library shelves districtwide.
The January 11 reinstatement of the title came a month after 12-year-old Mary Saczawa told trustees that she had found the book so compelling when she first read it as a fourth-grader that she sent a copy to a cousin in Missouri; similarly affected, the recipient shared the book with a third cousin in Florida. Superintendent Les Bivens, two school librarians, and other officials also registered protests over the restriction, the Associated Press reported January 13.
Blubber is the story of a fifth-grader tormented by classmates about her weight until one of the tormentors becomes the object of ridicule. The complainant had disapproved of Blume's use of “damn” twice in the text as well as its referring to a teacher in the story as a “bitch.”
Posted January 18, 1999.
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