Yes, Julián Is a Mermaid Is Banned!

Julián Is a Mermaid is a nearly wordless picture book about a boy who sees three women dressed as mermaids on the subway and becomes enchanted. When he gets home to Abuela’s apartment, he fashions his own mermaid costume from a curtain, ferns, and flowers. When Abuela sees what he’s done, she doesn’t scold him. She takes him to the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. Published by Candlewick Press in 2018, it was a Stonewall Book Award winner and appeared on nearly every “best picture books” list that year.

PEN America ranked it the third most banned picture book of the 2023-2024 school year. In Clay County, Florida, the Challenge Oversight Committee banned it for allegedly violating Florida’s obscenity laws, despite the book containing zero text that could remotely qualify as obscene. Keller ISD in Texas pulled it from shelves alongside dozens of other books in 2022. In Darien, Connecticut, a parent complained about its “gender message,” though the school board voted to keep it in the curriculum.

Why You Should Read This

The book has maybe forty words in it. A boy sees mermaids. He makes a costume. His grandmother smiles and takes him to a parade. Jessica Love’s watercolor illustrations are gorgeous, dreamy, warm. There’s no agenda, no lecture, no gender theory. A kid plays dress-up, and the adult in his life responds with love.

That this book ranks among the most banned picture books in America says everything about how paranoid the book-banning movement has become. Clay County banned it for “obscenity.” A picture book about a boy wearing a curtain like a mermaid tail. The gap between what’s in the book and what people claim is in the book is staggering. Give it to any child and they’ll see exactly what it is: a story about imagination and a grandmother who gets it.