How Book Bans Turned a Texas Town Upside Down (Published 2022) (2024)

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The group began convening around lunchtime last summer, inside of the rose-beige conference room at the Llano Library. They sat on red plastic chairs atop drab carpet, surrounded by donated dolls representing world cultures. Speaking in hushed tones about children’s books, sometimes they also prayed together. Rhonda Schneider, a librarian who was also a member of the group, had recently tipped them off to a few new titles she found questionable at the branch. They grew fixated on a series by Dawn McMillan and Ross Kinnaird, which included “My Butt Is So Noisy!” “I Broke My Butt!” and “I Need a New Butt!”

“A new butt! Mine’s got a crack,” one book begins. “I can see in the mirror a crack at the back.” The character then tries to figure out how it happened. Did he get the crack from going down the slide, or riding his BMX bike, or from a fart? He imagines all the new butts he could have: spotted purple and yellow, or a mural of watercolors, or an alien butt made from titanium that is fireproof, bulletproof and bombproof. “Kids loved it,” says Tricia Dwyer-Morgan, a member of Llano’s technology-services staff at the time.

Dwyer-Morgan remembers Schneider’s telling her that the books were “grooming stuff,” referencing a tactic that abusers use to gain the trust of a young victim. “We can’t have that in the library.”

From her perch near the kids’ stage and kitchen toys, Dwyer-Morgan’s colleague Tina Castelan, who became the Llano children’s librarian three years ago, watched the butt-book drama unfold. “I was trying to be a good little librarian,” Castelan told me. “A good little soldier.” Wanting to better understand the concerns of the group, she researched the butt books for hours and found no credible documentation of the series being linked to pedophilia or p*rnography. Some of the titles, it turned out, were acclaimed best sellers.

A patron of the library since she was 5, Castelan remembers visiting the branch in high school and finding the novel “Impulse,” by Ellen Hopkins, about three suicidal teenagers. It helped her cope with her own depression and feelings of alienation. When she tells people that story, some will respond that no kid should have been allowed to read so explicitly about suicide. But while she was growing up, the Llano librarians never questioned her choices. “If I hadn’t read that book,” she told me, “or read more books along the same line, I wouldn’t be here.” The librarians became a steady presence in her life. “I needed a place like this.” When the butt-book complaints first began, she was concerned, but quietly continued doing her job.

Over the next few weeks, calls to restrict the books only intensified, spreading through churches and on social media. Another Llano resident, Eva Carter, who owns and manages local rental properties, remembered friends from the group, mostly mothers, showing her the illustrations that had troubled them. “There was a little kid bent over with his bare butt,” Carter told me. “An adult painting on his behind.” (“Why not an arty-farty butt?” the book reads. “One not to be forgotten, with watercolors on the top and a mural on the bottom.”) Carter became a Christian in 1996, after hearing a Billy Graham sermon on television. “Getting the filthy books up out of their reach,” she said. “That’s what I’m about.” Carter, who is active on local boards, connected the group with a judge and other members of the county commissioners court.