Yes, Eleanor & Park Is Banned!

Rainbow Rowell’s 2013 novel tells the story of two misfit teenagers in 1986 Omaha, Nebraska. Eleanor is the new girl with a chaotic home life, an abusive stepfather, and wild red hair. Park is a half-Korean kid who reads comics and listens to The Smiths. They share a bus seat, then comic books, then a mixtape, and eventually fall in love. The novel won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award and was named one of the best books of the year by multiple publications.

In 2013, a parents’ group in Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District, the state’s largest, called the novel “profane” and demanded its removal from library shelves. Under pressure from the county government, the local library board disinvited Rowell from a speaking engagement while the challenge was pending. In 2017, Oregon’s Yamhill-Carlton School District pulled it from an 8th-grade classroom without following proper review procedures, later reconsidering after public outcry. The book has also been challenged in Texas and Florida for language and sexual content.

Why You Should Read This

Rowell writes first love the way it actually feels: terrifying, electric, and all-consuming. Park holds Eleanor’s hand for the first time, and it takes up an entire chapter because that’s how important it is when you’re 16. The book gets that proportion exactly right.

Eleanor’s home life is brutal. Her stepfather is dangerous, and her mother won’t protect her. Rowell doesn’t soften any of it, but she doesn’t sensationalize it either. The profanity that got the book challenged is how real teenagers talk, especially teenagers whose lives are falling apart. Cleaning up the language would make the characters less real, which would make the story less true.

The book is set in 1986 but feels timeless. Two kids finding each other on a school bus, sharing headphones, building a world small enough to fit between two seats. That’s a love story worth protecting.