Blood and Chocolate Scrubbed from
South Carolina Middle Schools
The Greenville, South Carolina, school board voted June 12 to keep Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause and Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan on high-school library shelves, but to pull Blood and Chocolate from Greenville’s middle-school libraries. At the meeting, teacher Teresa Carillo characterized Klause’s tale of a 16-year-old girl who loses her boyfriend after he discovers she is a werewolf as “low-level filth that corrupts” and urged the district to “offer rigor instead of raunchy,” according to a June 14 Associated Press report.
Blood and Chocolate won the 2000 Young Adult Book Award from the South Carolina Association of School Librarians. Killing Mr. Griffin, the story of several high-schoolers whose prank induces a fatal heart attack in their English teacher, was the fourth most-challenged book in 2000.
Carillo, another teacher, and a parent had appealed an advisory-panel recommendation to retain the books in middle- and high-school libraries but to remove them from classroom reading lists, despite a district policy allowing parents to opt their children out of any reading assignment they consider offensive.
Posted June 18, 2001.
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