BANNED BOOK SUMMARY

A Thousand Acres BY Smiley, Jane

But Smiley felt that her reputation as a writer was cemented when A THOUSAND ACRES was banned from a public high school reading list in Lynden, Washington, in Feb. 1994. The novel was assigned to be read alongside KING LEAR in an Advanced Placement English class. Responding to complaints from members of a conservative Christian coalition called the Washington Alliance of Families, the school's principal removed the novel from the reading list, stating that it has "no literary value in our community right now". The censorship was reported by newspapers across the country who quoted Smiley's response to the news: "Hot dog! I'm one of the big girls now," she said adding, "I have wonderful, excellent, good company. All the best books have been censored." Yet, Smiley's initial reaction to the banning of her book soon turned to dismay when she discovered the reason why:

When I first hear that my novel A THOUSAND ACRES, had been banned in Lynden Was., I thought, "At last!" My hard intellectual labors of linking Shakespeare with incest, Christianity, and ecologically destructive agriculture had finally been rewarded with what I've always thought they deserved - the outrage of the very people I had been intending to challenge and offend.

You can imagine my disappointment, then, when I discovered that the grounds for the banning was the same old, same old - use of the "f" work and heterosex between consenting adults (of course, there is also an inflammatory passage about a woman in bed looking under her sheet to contemplate her own body).

Too Funny !!!