So much of this current wave of book banning seems knee-jerk and thoughtless. Scrolling through my Twitter feed a couple months ago, I noticed a current target of the book-banning wave is a YA novel by Jonathan Evisan called Lawn Boy.

Groups of conservative parents were demonizing it as promoting homosexuality and pedophilia, demanding their school systems remove it from libraries.

Curious, I bought the novel as an e-book and read it. I guess it should go without saying that an award-winning book lots of school librarians are buying does not promote pedophilia. How anyone got that idea is beyond me. I guess it has something to do with the first person narrator’s (very dryly and with no erotic detail) relating an incident of sexual exploration with an age peer when he was a child, in order to tell a thoughtless friend he doesn’t like hearing crude homophobic slurs.

But that’s it. That’s all.

All the characters in the book are straight. The main character is almost a virgin, and he’s pretty sweet and wholesome. He’s also hard-working and of the kind of good character you’d think most conservatives would want their children emulating.

The book is not great literature, but it’s a pretty good book. It’s not a controversial book, or at least it shouldn’t be, though the author does touch on issues of race and class that might make some conservatives uncomfortable. But even that is … hardly overt. It’s just a story about a young man overcoming obstacles.

The book is being banned because parents who obviously didn’t read it are engaged in moral panic. (For examples of the panic, check out some of the shrill reader reviews on Goodreads.) I guess we see this periodically, waves of panic like this. And yes, it is distressingly un-American.