Page 27 - BCALA Spring 2018

know, my life matters.
right one.
When I consider my primary area of research, intellectual freedom and censorship, I note that libraries have long taken a strong position
in opposing censorship and supporting intellectual freedom. As Robert Wengert noted in 2001, “Saying censorship is wrong is not a neutral position—libraries have taken a stand.”
Libraries, any library, cannot presume to be a hub for a community by being neutral.
If libraries are about people then they must take people’s lives seriously. Even when supporting those lives might court some controversy.
Deciding not to support marginalized people is never neutral. It is always a choice.
That may seem stark, but as
Steven Joyce notes in his article collected in Library Juice Press
and Progressive Librarians’ ‘Questioning Library Neutrality’ “neutrality is a form of fence sitting, a form of silence.”
This is not always an easy stance to take and you must weigh pros and cons but I would say that it is the
BCALA NEWS | Volume 45, Issue 2 | 27
Book Review: The Education of Margot Sanchez, by Lilliam Rivera
By Jina DuVernay, Alabama State University
The Education of Margot Sanchez; 2017
304 pages
$18.99 Hardcover. ISBN 13: 978-1481472111
A teenage Puerto Rican girl is caught in the middle of two boys, new and old friendships and family.
Margot Sanchez must spend her entire summer working in her father’s grocery store in the Bronx
as punishment for stealing his credit card to buy clothing to impress her new prep school friends. Lilliam Rivera’s debut novel is filled with stark contrasts such as Margot’s domineering father and her passive mother, her blonde, blue-eyed prep school crush and Moises, a young activist fighting to stop gentrification in his Bronx neighborhood and her former best friend, Elizabeth, and her new friends from school.
Margot’s sole goal is to work to repay the money that she stole so that
she can go to the much anticipated
end-of-summer pool party with her new friends in the Hamptons. She constantly denies the beauty of the Bronx, her curly hair and her growing feelings for Moises but soon finds out that the things that she is running away from are the very things that she never knew she wanted. This coming-of-age novel explores the struggle between being yourself and trying to be who others want you
to be. In dealing with her parents strained marriage, her brother’s violent outbursts, her father’s secret, her unfulfilled friendships and her boy crushes, Margot begins to truly value those who love and care about her as she finds the courage to love and value herself, curly hair and all.
This young adult novel is a riveting must-read about betrayal, love and redemption.