Hello Friends,

Today, I’d like to discuss a few banned and often challenged books: Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, a YA multiple award winner and Lucky by Alice Sebold, which should be withdrawn from libraries, but not for the reasons it is being banned.

Before we dive into these books, I want to note that this week Utah banned another book in all of its public schools: Stephen King’s Different Seasons which contains four novellas, two of which were adapted for the films The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me.

Anyone who has read “The Body” or seen Stand By Me will understand why schools were using the collection in the classroom. It’s quite possible that this was the only story in the collection that was assigned. And now the students have lost access to studying it.

When such works are removed, it’s unclear that the goal is to protect the teens or tweens. What is clear is that relatable stories are disappearing from the curriculum.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

Over the past few years, I have been discussing banned books most of which were published a decade or more ago. I thought it would be fun to read a more recent one and see what the issues are. I recently picked up Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo because it is so highly regarded and so often vilified. I wanted to know why.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature (2021), the Stonewall Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Michael L. Printz Honor, and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Wow. And so deserving.

Lily Hu is a Chinese American teen living in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s. While she deals with prejudice because of her race, her family is also afraid of the McCarthy-era milieu in which all people of Chinese heritage are suspected of having Communist sympathies. In fact, Lily’s father, a doctor, has been targeted by the FBI for not naming one of his patients as a Communist and his citizenship papers have been confiscated.

As a rising high school senior, Lily is awakening to her sexuality and thrills to an ad for a performance by Tommy Andrews, a male impersonator, at the Telegraph Club. She later learns that a classmate—smart and kind Kath Miller—has been to the lesbian night club. The two strike up a friendship over their common academic interests and later become romantically involved. They sneak out of their houses a few times to go to the Telegraph Club late at night. Eventually, the club is raided and Lily must decide whether to tell her parents the truth and support Kath, or live a lie.

I’m sure the reason Telegraph Club is so often censored is that, at one point, the two girls have a sexual encounter that is briefly described. It’s a natural development of their relationship and only a few paragraphs of the entire novel, which is full of: great character development; a keen perception of the racial prejudice and Communist hysteria of the 1950s; and a very moving first-love story.

After reading Telegraph Club, it’s hard to say how sorry I am that this novel is so often banned. It’s not only a great book, but its emotional pull will benefit all readers. I want to say that it’s very dear, but I’m not sure that conveys my sense of the book. The main characters are sweet, kind to one another, and fumbling through adolescence in the most real way. We love them and root for their happiness. All of which is to say that the novel has an uncommon tenderness. It’s just nuts to keep this excellent work of YA fiction away from teens.

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Utah Banning of Alice Sebold’s Lucky.

Apparently, Utah’s school districts are working backward in time to ban books. The recently banned Lucky by Alice Sebold was published way back in 1999. It’s the author’s story about an extremely violent rape and what followed—the arrest and conviction of a Black man for the assault. While the rape in fact did happen, the man convicted was innocent. This was only proven long after the memoir was published, long after Sebold became a bestselling author with her novel The Lovely Bones. When the alleged rapist was exonerated, the publisher, Scribner, pulled the memoir from distribution.

Back in the day, I used to ‘booktalk’ Lucky to high school classes who came in looking for memoirs. I also posted a review on School Library Lady, discussing why I thought the book was a good choice for high school students. Once the convicted man was exonerated, I removed the review from public view. So the banning of the book in all public schools in Utah (along with 36 other titles) has me thinking about how book curation and weeding in school libraries actually works.

Librarians remove books all the time. Otherwise, there would be no room for new ones. Common reasons for removal are the physical condition of the book (falling apart), lack of interest as shown by checkout stats, and outdated information. The outdated information usually pertains to the sciences (Someday, man will go to the moon!), but it can also be that the information in the book proves to be incorrect.

The easiest example I can give of books with bad info, one that everyone will understand, is memoirs and biographies by or about Lance Armstrong. Think of it—in my high school library, we had LOTS of Lance. Since our population included ESL students, we had biographies beginning at the third grade reading level and going through adult level. Lots of companies that published books specifically for schools sold Lance. He was included in all sorts of series—American heroes, top athletes, role models for our time, etc. And again, these were written at various reading and lexile levels. We talked these books up; they circulated well. And then we had to weed them all. Our role model into the recycle bin.

Lucky is a book with the same fate. Not because Sebold was a liar as was Armstrong—her story of being raped at knifepoint and beaten and the aftermath is true and horrifying. But the book is inaccurate because it tells us that the rapist was caught and imprisoned. So it belongs in the recycle bin. Even though Utah schools had the book in the last 25 years, if it was still in the collection, I’d be surprised. Maybe the schools don’t have a level of staffing that allows time for weeding. (This is a very common problem and was true of my job as a teacher librarian.)

The story surrounding Sebold’s rape and the conviction and later exoneration of Anthony Broadwater, is tragic. Broadwater was wrongfully imprisoned for 16 years and spent 22 years as a registered sexual offender. There are so many missteps and genuinely bad police work.

If read together, two articles give us a solid overview of the situation. One was published in the New Yorker in May 2023 “The Tortured Bond of Alice Sebold and the Man Wrongfully Convicted of Her Rape” by Rachel Aviv. A second came out a few weeks ago (June 30, 2026), That Guy is Still Out There by Joaquin Sapien in ProPublica.

The New Yorker article may be password protected (no gift link available to me, sorry.) The ProPublica article is free to all readers. They are pretty long, but I highly recommend reading them. Meanwhile, below I paraphrase and quote from each. These are only a few of the points the articles make, but they will give you a sense of what happened.

From the New Yorker

* During a police lineup, Sebold identified a different man—not Broadwater. After signing a form that confirmed her decision, she felt a wave of nausea. She sensed that she’d made the wrong choice.

* The assistant district attorney, Gail Uebelhoer, was a thirty-one-year-old pregnant woman whom Sebold saw as a role model, her guide through a court system dominated by men. Considering the terrible track record of the Syracuse (New York) PD in solving rape crimes, Uebelhoer was looking for a win and for a chance to help a young girl. She told Sebold that the reason she’d picked the young man in the lineup was that Broadwater had asked “an almost identical-looking friend from jail to stand in the No. 5 spot and stare at her, to scare and fluster her. (In fact, Broadwater was not friends with the man in the No. 5 spot, and they did not look the same.)”

* On the stand in a grand jury trial, Sebold said she wasn’t sure she picked the right man.

* Police and prosecutors pushed forward with the charges against Broadwater anyway, and Sebold ultimately identified him as her attacker in the 1982 trial.

* Broadwater was convicted primarily based on Sebold’s testimony and microscopic hair analysis. The hair analysis was a forensic technique that the U.S. Department of Justice later debunked as “junk science.”

* Following tireless efforts by his lawyers and the discovery of serious prosecutorial flaws, Broadwater’s conviction was officially vacated by Judge Gordon Cuffy in November 2021. He concluded that the conviction rested on a debunked hair analysis and a tainted lineup.

* Sebold released a public statement expressing deep remorse. She stated, “I will forever be sorry for what was done to him” and expressed regret that her pursuit of justice resulted in an innocent young man being brutalized by a flawed legal system.

* In March 2023, the State of New York reached a $5.5 million settlement with Broadwater for his wrongful conviction.

From ProPublica

The article “That Guy is Still Out There,” includes more recent discoveries, including the facts that there was at least one serial rapist operating in and around Syracuse University at the time Sebold was assaulted and that the police and the university attempted to hide this fact.

“What’s clear is that no part of the system in Syracuse at the time could be depended on. Police brushed off rapes. Prosecutors bungled confessions or were defeated at trial. Judges overlooked irregularities. And one of the most powerful institutions in the city, Syracuse University, seemed more interested in suppressing news of a rape epidemic than solving it. There were police reports of sexual assaults near the campus marked “no press.” A former detective testified that the files were marked that way at the university’s request.”

* At least one serial rapist was on the streets — and sexual assaults resembling Sebold’s continued for years, even while Broadwater was behind bars. There were at least three other sexual attacks in the immediate area in the same year.

“One woman had told police that a man dragged her into a wooded section of the park. When she resisted, the report stated, he “began to punch her in the face” and “ordered her to remove her pants.”

“As with Sebold’s case, the police report was dismissive. One officer asserted that the victim was “retarded” and had run away from a nearby halfway house. The staff there said that she had complained of a similar incident two weeks prior and that she was having “difficulty adjusting.” The case was put on ice just hours after it had been reported.”

* There was no indication in the police reports that these attacks might have been connected. The reporter found no articles about any of these assaults in newspaper archives.

* More than a dozen women reported being raped or attacked by strangers within half a square mile over four years.

“Women were being sexually assaulted in their dorm rooms and in student apartments, walking out of grocery stores or on their way to the library. A nursing student was attacked at the same spot as Sebold, on the same day that her roommate was raped in their shared apartment. A freshman was raped in a sorority house by a man who broke in through a window. The descriptions of the perpetrators were often eerily similar. They frequently carried a knife. And several were roughly the same height, weight and race.”

* In the 1980s and ’90s, a prosecutor would get into a scuffle, on live TV, with a candidate who had just won the race for DA. The police crime lab lost its accreditation. “The doctor who led the county medical examiner’s office resigned after an investigation found he had routinely removed organs from corpses without consent from the victims’ families. His employees had posed playfully for photos over the body of a woman who had died by suicide.”

* Former Syracuse detective Paul Clapper wondered whether the wrong man had been sent to prison. After he left the force, he raised the name of a confessed and convicted rapist with a lengthy and violent record who closely matched the physical description of Sebold’s assailant.

* “‘No press,’ Clapper testified in 2025, ‘means that Syracuse University put their foot down and said no press for any kind of rape, robbery, burglary … in the area of Syracuse University.’”

* When Sebold picked the man standing next to Broadwater in the lineup, the case should have ended then and there, in the view of the DA today. “You know, she didn’t pick out the wrong guy. She picked out the guy. She picked out the guy that she thought had raped her. And it wasn’t Anthony,” Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick told ProPublica. “Case is over. Stop.”

* At one point in the 1980s, a local news article reported that the district attorney’s office had suffered nine trial defeats in a row. Uebelhoer was quoted saying “juries are looking for a perfect victim, but they don’t exist.” She saw Sebold as a standout, writing in a memo as the case was transferred to Mastine: “Good luck. Victim is excellent witness.”

“The trial was peppered with irregularities. Broadwater and his lawyer had opted for a bench trial, hoping that a judge would see the paucity of evidence and wouldn’t be swayed by emotion. But the judge seemed to have a soft spot for Sebold. During a break in the proceedings, he spoke to Sebold privately, according to her memoir, expressing concern about how she was holding up and asking about her family. Had a juror done such a thing, they would likely have been kicked off the jury and a mistrial might’ve been declared. (The judge died in 2009.)”

A police report of a rape soon after Broadwater had been convicted sounded a lot like Sebold’s rape. This, I believe, is the most important addition the ProPublica article makes to the New Yorker article.

A young woman was jogging through a wooded section of the park when she heard someone behind her.

“Suddenly she was in the grip of a man dragging her by the neck behind a cluster of trees. He forced her to perform oral sex, then pulled her sweatpants down and raped her. She reported that her assailant was Black, about 5’9”, 140 pounds, muscular and around 16 years old.

“Those details did not draw a lot of notice at the time. But they fit the description of a rapist who would soon become well-known to the Syracuse police. Only four months after Broadwater was found guilty, a high schooler named Thomas Weakfall admitted raping five women. The crimes had begun in late 1981, he said in a statement taken by Clapper. Four of them occurred less than a mile from Thornden Park. Weakfall, according to police reports, had provided “certain facts only the perpetrator would have known.”

“There’s no evidence that Weakfall assaulted Sebold, but there’s no denying he matched key elements of the description she gave. Sebold had told police her rapist was Black, 16 to 18 years of age, about 5’7” and 150 pounds. Weakfall was Black, 16 years old, 5’9” and 140 pounds, according to police reports.”

DNA evidence wasn’t a possibility in 1982. It could have been used in the 2020s when the case was reviewed, but the physical evidence from her case was gone. And the statute of limitations on these rapes expired decades ago. What would be great right now is a book about Anthony Broadwater. His story has been in the works, at least as a movie, but has fallen through. But there is still the possibility.

The Job of the Library is Correction and Weeding

So, as to library books: yes, there is incorrect information in them from time to time. The librarian can’t know what is unknown. (She is not, after all, Donald Rumsfeld.) When she finds an error, she corrects. This is how weeding should be executed.

The fate of a library book shouldn’t rest on a scene where a couple of girls make out in a locked classroom, as is true of Telegraph Club.

Thanks!

Thanks for hanging with me on this one! Next week will be our ‘Library and Banned Books News’ roundup. After that, I hope to have a look at a project I completed last week, one I am very proud of—and one that tells a story in fabric.

On a personal note, I was found to have a melanoma but it was successfully removed and I am cancer-free! Yay!

If you’d like to read about a time when I decided to remove a book after a student complaint about sexual content (what my reasoning was):

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com