This year I'm trying to read 12 banned or challenged books, and if you've been paying attention at all to the current situation facing school and public libraries in the US, you've probably already guessed why.

I decided to start with Bless Me, Ultima because it's a book I've always vaguely meant to get to at some point, and I thought it would be interesting to read something that has been banned for reasons other than depicting queer people existing. (I know that a lot of my reading for this project is going to be books that people are mad about because they depict queer people existing, and that's going to get depressing, and I'm going to need variety. I'm going to need to find some twisted comfort in reminding myself that sometimes people get irrationally angry about things other than queer people existing.)

I kind of expected that I would read this and it would be a pretty tame coming-of-age story about a young Chicano boy, and I would think, "huh, why would anyone ban this?" This was not the case. I can imagine that the child characters coming to straightforwardly heretical conclusions about God and worshiping a pagan golden carp deity definitely raised some eyebrows, not to mention the strong language and violence. I can also imagine people falling into the trap of assuming that the age of a book's protagonist reflects the best age of the reader, and then being shocked that this book presumably for young children has a brothel and brujeria in it.

That said, of course Bless Me, Ultima should not be banned. It's a significant book in Chicano literature and has interesting things to say about the protagonist Antonio's developing spiritual consciousness, and about the painful loss of innocence and grappling with the existence of evil that everyone goes through as we grow up.

I will say that I wanted to enjoy reading this book more than I actually did. I didn't really connect with the writing style, the long interludes of horseplay grated on my nerves, and I was frustrated by how little characterization the women and girls in the book were given. But I liked Antonio as a character (although his levels of perceptiveness and introspection at age 7 beggar belief), I loved his relationship with Ultima, and there are scenes that feel just about perfect. Anaya captures the landscape really well, and at a certain point I just started imagining everything in the style of a Studio Ghibli movie, because despite the very different setting, it just fits. Nature, the food, the scene where Cico shows Antonio the golden carp for the first time... Read the book and tell me it doesn't work.