Can Fiction Books Convince People of a Different Reality?
Who decides if a book should be banned?
Inside the O’Briens is a tale of a man, named Joe, diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease. It’s a sad story following a Catholic family living in Boston and dealing with Joe’s exponentially increasing symptoms. It also happened to be a book I read for a book club. In the discussion with the book club members, a man was furious that the author portrayed Irish Catholics a certain way. The O’Briens were lower-middle class and frowned upon their daughter dating anyone who also wasn’t Irish Catholic. He dismissed the entire book and pronounced it false because the author herself is Italian and not Irish. Technically, as a fiction book, it is indeed false. He somehow missed the part where Lisa Genova is also a neuroscientist and everything she wrote about Huntington’s Disease is directly related to her field of research, but he was really stuck on her being Italian.
It’s hard to blame him for his outburst because the subject comes up more than you would think. Recently, the book American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins caused quite an outcry of controversy. Jeanine wrote a story of a mother and son fleeing from a cartel in Mexico, and since Jeanine isn’t Mexican herself, and writes these characters in a harmful way to the Latino community, people have issues with it being…
