Review: Attack of the Black Rectangles
Attack of the Black Rectangles by Amy Sarig King Scholastic, 2022 Category: Middle Grade Reviewer: Heidi Rabinowitz Buy at Bookshop.org Mac's sixth-grade reading group discovers that their school copies of the Holocaust classic The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen have been censored with black rectangles. The blacked-out the passages, "hands over her breasts" and "She motioned toward her own undeveloped chest," take place in a harsh concentration camp setting and are in no way sexual, but their teacher is uncomfortable with these references to human body parts and thinks she is protecting the twelve-year-old readers with this action. Mac and his friends resent being dictated to, lied to, and not being taken seriously by the adults around them. They organize and bring the matter to the school board, helping their uptight town wake up: "Until we started our protests, people thought they had to follow rules no matter how weird the rules were. We reminded