KUTZTOWN, Pa. — If you ban it, they will come.
For the better part of an hour Saturday, dozens of teenagers and their parents snaked around the towering stacks of tomes inside Kutztown's Firefly Books and sometimes spilled onto the sidewalks of this quaint Berks County college town — most of them clutching the book that conservatives on the local school board didn't want them to read.
Calliope Price, 14 and in the eighth grade, came out to meet Alan Gratz — author of the "banned" young-adult novel about climate change, "Two Degrees" — after hearing about the controversy and realizing that Gratz had also written her favorite book, which is called, ironically, "Ban This Book." Holding her now-signed copy, she weighed in on Kutztown Area Middle School canceling a planned "One School, One Book" program amid conservative complaints a climate book would somehow scare or indoctrinate adolescents.
