My con to pro ratio is a bit off today.
The Year They Burned the Books by Nancy Garden
Release Date: September 22nd, 1999
Re-Release Date: September 5th, 2017
SYNS: When Wilson High Telegraph editor Jamie Crawford writes an opinion piece in support of the new sex-ed curriculum, which includes making condoms available to high school students, she has no idea that a huge controversy is brewing. Lisa Buel, a school board member, is trying to get rid of the health program, which she considers morally flawed, from its textbooks to its recommendations for outside reading. The newspaper 
staff find themselves in the center of the storm, and things are complicated by the fact that Jamie is in the process of coming to terms with being gay, and her best friend, Terry, also gay, has fallen in love with a boy whose parents are anti-homosexual. As Jamie’s and Terry’s sexual orientation becomes more obvious to other students, it looks as if the paper they’re fighting to keep alive and honest is going to be taken away from them.
REVIEW
(I received an ARC of this re-release for my free and honest review on Netgalley.)
The Year They Burned the Books killed me a little bit. I loved it a lot in many, many ways, but at times it was just as aggravating as it was heart-wrenching.
I felt that, on many levels, this book encapsulates what it feels like to be a part of the LGBTQIA+ community right now, given the current state of the US political scene (which I won’t get into here), even though this book technically takes place in the past, before same-sex marriage had been legalized across all states. While Jamie struggles to come to terms with her own sexuality, her integrity as a journalist is threatened by outside forces– a school board election puts an aggressive conservative in charge, and she wants to throw out positive information surrounding safe sex and contraception, as well as any and all positive takes on homosexuality. Knowing that they’re being protected by an important member of the community, more and more people who share these beliefs feel emboldened to make their presence known, and Jamie’s pro-sex-education editorial at the beginning of the book puts her directly in the line of fire. As time passes, Jamie is turned on by an increasing number of her classmates– including her former best friend, Nomi. This leaves Jamie to battle her own internal conflicts while also having to fight to stop the fast march her small East Coast town starts taking towards a hate-filled and bigoted future.
This outstanding pressure is expressed well throughout the book and the majority of the narrative is high-strung and tense, just as Jamie is. I think that’s what I liked the most about The Year They Burned The Books.
There were things I wasn’t such a fan of, though, like the continuous use of homophobic slurs throughout the Entirety of the book. At first, I was willing to let it slide, because the characters that were using them were meant to showcase rampant homophobia in a community, but then it got a little excessive. I felt like I couldn’t turn a page or two without seeing some kind of slur, and even in the penultimate pages, where things are supposed to be taking this upswing, slurs are thrown out by the main characters themselves, which I guess was meant to be some “we’re taking back that word” overarching statement, but that fails to have any strength to it when it was being used just as aggressively as the antagonistic characters had used it. Instead of it being a “this is our term to use”, it felt more like “that negative thing you called us? we are that”. There was no ownage of the word, I guess? I don’t know, I was mostly just tired of seeing it on the page by the end of the book.
And speaking of the end, I think it came way too fast. What I thought would be the climax– the actual book burning– came on a lot later than I thought it would, and the book seemed to be at its bleakest point within the final pages, only to have a massive upheaval by way of a time skip in the last chapter. Instead of finally having a sense of relief and happiness for the characters at the end, I was still reeling from arguably the worst turn of events happening a few pages before. The happy moment also only lasts a few pages, like a placating “here, by the way, all the characters turn out fine. the end” sort of business.
Plus, a lot of the conclusion to this book felt like, instead of the people in the community learning to accept their non-straight friends and family, it felt more like the book was okay with advocating for “I hate that you’re gay but I’ll love you in spite of it”, which isn’t exactly ideal? And is actually kind of stressful?
There were also mentions of attempted suicide, and one mention of rape, which isn’t carried out in the pages of the book but is mentioned by Jamie after a group of bullies are stopped while beating up her and her best friend Terry, as something that could’ve happened if someone hadn’t intervened. It left me feeling a little uncomfortable with how these two major things were treated casually.
I could keep going, on both the positive and negative sides of this book, but I think that anything past this point would just be me nitpicking my Hot Takes™ instead of offering my constructive opinion, so I’ll leave it here.
Overall, I give The Year They Burned the Books 3 out of 5.1 (like 451? Am I funny?) unlit matches.
Almost Professional 