Read "The Face on the Milk Carton"

The book I have chose to cover is "The Face on the Milk Carton" which is part of the Janie Johnson series. The other books in the series "Whatever Happened to Janie?", "The Voice On The Radio" and "What Janie Found" were also banned. This book was removed from the curriculum for Flour Bluff Independent School District in Texas, U.S. in 2003. The reasons cited for banning this book are a faint reference to the idea of sex and that the central character Janie Johnson is challenging her parents' authority. I do not agree with banning this book as these reasons are not acceptable. The faint reference to the idea of sex is when Janie and her boyfriend Reeve are thinking about having sex but decide not to. Janie challenging her parents' authority is referring to her thinking she was kidnapped and wanted to find out the truth. She runs away with her boyfriend to find her parents. Granted running away from home should not be encouraged but neither should lying to your children. This book revolves around a 15-year-old girl who finds a picture of herself as a little girl on a milk carton. She decides to confront her parents about this and her parents tell her that they are her grandparents. Janie is not convinced and decides to look into this missing girl and finds her birth parents at the end of this book. With parents having less rights now then they used to they are losing control of their children. Banning books like this one and others takes away the freedom of choice that allows the reader to formulate their own opinions and beliefs.

Many books have been banned for their sexual content some other examples are: Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Fanny Hill by John Cleland, Leaves of  Grass by Walt Whitman, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, Rabbit, Run by John Updike, Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, and Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov.