
At the Tillamook County Library, demand to check out Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents shot up this past fall.
In late October, all five copies of the 1991 novel were checked out, with 15 additional holds, representing people wishing to check the book out.
“That is quite a number,” Don Allgeier, director of the Tillamook library, said. “There has been a real uptick of people putting that book on hold.”
In comparison, Allgeier said 18 people had placed holds on Intermezzo, Sally Rooney’s newest novel, published earlier this year.
“To keep up with the demand,” Allgeier said, the library bought two more copies of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, increasing the number of copies in circulation to five.
“There are a lot of people reading that novel,” Allgeier said.
Why?
In August, the Tillamook School Board voted to remove How the García Girls Lost Their Accents from the curriculum of a 10th-grade honors English class, prohibiting the book from being taught.
Throughout Oregon, attempts to ban books have led — ironically, perhaps — to increased demand to read those books.
FREEDOM TO READ: Library book bans in Oregon
Second of three parts
Last year, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and George Mason University published a study showing that banning books often leads to increased demand and circulation for those books.
The researchers analyzed book circulation data for 17,000 titles, which included more than 1,500 banned books that appear on lists, from 2021 and 2022, maintained by the American Library Association and PEN America.
On average, circulation of books that face challenges and possible banning increased by 12 percent. If a book was banned in one state, that caused an 11 percent increase in demand for that book in other states. The data also suggest that increase in circulation also elevated the profiles of lesser known authors.
“As a public library director, you want people reading,” Allgeier said. “It’s not necessarily the method we would choose.”
In 2023, the Canby School Board considered removing 36 books from the high school’s library. The list included Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved, John Green’s Looking for Alaska, and Jeannette Walls’ celebrated memoir The Glass Castle.
The school board voted to remove only one book — Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita — and restrict access to four other books.
Marisa Ely, the librarian at Canby Public Library, said demand to check out books on the school board’s list shot up.
“We had a massive amount of requests in person and online for the books on that list,” she said. “I mean, massive.”
All copies of the books on the school board’s list that were in the library’s circulation were checked out and on hold for weeks.


Ely added that Gender Queer is “one of those books that has barely sat on the shelf. It’s always out.”
Published in 2022, Gender Queer is a critically acclaimed graphic coming-of-age memoir about gender, identity, and living outside the gender binary. It is one of the most frequently challenged books, both in Oregon and nationally, with challengers arguing the book is sexually explicit, pornographic, and inappropriate for children.
The book was challenged in 2023 at Chetco Community Public Library in Brookings. Julie VanHoose, the library director at Chetco, said the library — and its sister libraries in Curry County — have four copies of Gender Queer in circulation, which are regularly checked out.
It is a common practice for libraries to weed, or remove, books, from circulation if they have not been checked out in a certain period of time. That allows libraries to make room for new, and more popular, books. The Chetco library weeds out books if they sit on the shelf for three years.
Before the 2023 challenge, VanHoose said Gender Queer had not been checked out in more than a year. “Circulation may have dropped,” VanHoose said, had the book not been challenged.
The top reason for book challenges is that the books in question are inappropriate for children. But in the Tillamook library’s case, Allgeier said the patrons checking out How the García Girls Lost Their Accents were all adults over 18.
While some may be concerned that certain books are inappropriate for children, it turns out that those books can be a kid’s favorite.
During the McMinnville School Board’s Oct. 14 meeting, the board heard a presentation about McMinnville High School’s library. (At the same meeting, the school board voted to uphold its vote not to remove seven books from the school library).
The presentation included seven students who use the library; each took a turn speaking to the board about a specific library program they used or enjoyed.
After the presentation, a board member asked the students to list their favorite genre. The students listed fiction (“because there’s fun stuff you can find out”), graphic novels, fantasy (which got the nod from a second student), and sci-fi; for one student, it was a toss-up between horror and fantasy.
Another board member asked the students to name, out of the books they had read in the past year, their favorite.
One student named the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, acclaimed children’s books, all of which are banned in Florida.
Another said J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, which has been banned and faced challenges numerous times, including in 2021 in Alamagordo, N.M., where it was burned by a Christian rights organization.
“There are so many books,” a third student answered, then said his “current favorites” are The Fault in Our Stars and The Hunger Games. Both have been banned from school libraries throughout the country.
Buzzy Nielsen, a program manager at the State Library of Oregon, recalled working at a school library in the early 2000s that dealt with a challenge to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. “Suddenly, all the kids in the junior-senior English class wanted to do their book reports on it,” he remembered, laughing. “It’s just human. You wonder, ‘Well, why don’t they want me to read this?’”
“Because of book banning around the country, we will have people come in asking for books” Ely said. “If you put something up for discussion, or ban it, or remove it, a lot of people want to know why. They find those materials and then decide for themselves.”
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Sunday: As efforts to ban books in Oregon libraries increase, library patrons and supporters are pushing back
Coming Tuesday: Most challenged books in Oregon are about or by people who identify as LGBTQ, or belong to a racial or ethnic minority. A bill in the Legislature would address that.
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