A Continuing Controversy

by Nathalie Atkinson, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 4/6/2006

It’s hardly a bedtime story, but Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Students Speak (Groundwood Books) has been keeping librarians and educators in Canada awake at night.

As the title suggests, the nonfiction book by award-winning children’s author Deborah Ellis contains short narrative interviews with Jewish, Christian and Muslim youth (ages 8 to 18) who are on the front lines of the Middle East conflict. It chronicles their aspirations and the impact of war on their lives as they navigate an everyday world of security checkpoints, bombs and uncertain futures. But in recent weeks, Three Wishes has been removed from elementary school library shelves or been given limited access in a growing number of school districts in Ontario, where the issue of whether the book—intended for ages 9-12—is age inappropriate has come into question.

Although Three Wishes was published nearly two years ago, the controversy began in early February when concerns were raised by the Canadian Jewish Congress, who argue that the book’s lack of historical and political context make its contents unsuitable for children in grades 4 to 6. Specifically, the CJC wrote to every school board in Ontario requesting that Three Wishes be reconsidered from the Ontario Library Association’s Silver Birch Award list of recommended reading and from contention for the annual award (a program to promote recreational reading in which children in grades 4 to 6 across the province vote for their favorite book next month). As a result, the Toronto District School Board has made Three Wishes off-limits to children below grade 7, removing it from elementary library shelves (children who want to borrow it can still do so with written parental permission).

Several short passages are at the crux of the controversy; most often cited is a three-page section featuring a Palestinian girl trying to make sense of her sister—a suicide bomber’s—death. She calls female suicide bombers “martyrs” and says they are “brave,” and talks about joining her in heaven. In an impassioned letter in defense of the book posted on Groundwood’s Web site, publisher Patsy Aldana outlines her company’s philosophy of treating the realities of the world “in a moral and ethical way. For us this means never sugarcoating, sentimentalizing, or hiding hard truths that our authors may wish to describe in their books.”

Last week the politically charged controversy culminated in a press conference, attended by representatives from PEN Canada, the Writer’s Union of Canada, People for Education and the Ontario Library Association. Aldana spoke at the press conference, calling the boards’ actions an “unprecedented wave of censorship,” while author and activist June Callwood read a statement from Ellis, who was unable to attend due to a school reading in the U.S. Her statement emphasized the importance of trusting the sophistication of today’s children: “I have done many school talks around my books about children in war. Kids can handle the truth about what is being done to other children. It’s adults who get squeamish. They say, ‘We must protect our children from such things,’ when really they are protecting themselves from having to answer the question: ‘What are you doing to make the world better?” (Notably, Ellis’s Breadwinner trilogy, although fiction, was also informed by current events—the war in Afghanistan—and went on to become an international bestseller.)

The story is also playing out in the national media; in a recent column for The Globe & Mail, columnist Rick Salutin echoed Aldana’s comments, arguing that children can handle honest reporting about war because they are already inundated with images of it. “They are war babies—in the sense that they were barely coming to awareness on 9/11. Maybe their parents turned the sound down and tried to shield them from those collapsing towers, but they saw the visuals, endlessly. They are more war babies than I was—born in 1942 but not subjected to the media barrage of war images and news they saw, while they were learning to walk and talk. I know a seven-year-old who often says, ‘Will I still be alive when the war in Iraq ends?’ He can’t recall it not being there.”

In the coming weeks, the decision to restrict access to Three Wishes will be reviewed by the TDSB’s board of trustees. As school boards across the province and country continue to weigh in, Ellis herself is undeterred: one of her books in progress, I Am a Taxi, will be about children who are used to smuggle drugs in Bolivia.