Love in the Library

More of a delayed protest than a mini-review.

I bought this book after a Facebook friend posted a blog from the book’s author: Maggie Tokuda-Hall. She described how Scholastic Inc. had offered to publish her story in the US, but asked her to remove several sentences about racism from her Afterword.

The book, illustrated by Yas Imamura, describes how Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s grandparents – of Japanese descent – met and fell in love while interned by the US government during World War II. An event that’s now far in the past. But the US publisher wanted the following sentence, and other references to present-day racism, removed.

“As much as I would hope this would be a story of a distant past, it is not. It’s very much the story of America here and now.”

So what we would have ended up with is a nice little picture book about two people falling in love in a distant time during unpleasant circumstances that we no longer need to be reminded about. Maggie Tokuda-Hall refused Scholastic’s request. As of May this year, she’s still refusing. You can read about it all on her blog - www.prettyokmaggie.com/blog - where she's considerably more articulate about the whole affair than I've been.

And it’s a good book too, by the way.