Banned Books, Crop Tops and Oth­er Bad Influ­ences is a mid­dle-grade nov­el about the clas­sic themes of young ado­les­cence — chang­ing friend­ships, wor­ries about appear­ance, fit­ting in and pop­u­lar­i­ty, clash­es with par­ents, and adapt­ing to a rapid­ly chang­ing inter­nal and exter­nal world. At the begin­ning of the book, Rose, a thir­teen-year-old Jew­ish girl, encoun­ters Talia, a girl from New York who has moved to the small Michi­gan town where Rose has lived all her life. Talia is in Rose’s class at school and belongs to the same syn­a­gogue, but rumor has it that Talia is a girl who gets into a lot of trou­ble. Talia has a rocky start at school and seems to be liv­ing up to her rebel­lious rep­u­ta­tion when she chal­lenges their his­to­ry teacher about the Amer­i­can bomb­ing of Hiroshi­ma and Nagasaki.

Talia is a rebel but also a thinker. ​“Things don’t have to be just the way things are,” she tells Rose. Talia intro­duces Rose to a nov­el about the Ger­man transat­lantic lin­er St. Louis, a ship car­ry­ing Jew­ish refugees to the Unit­ed States that is sent back to Ger­many in 1939. Rose sub­se­quent­ly learns that the book is not on her school’s approved read­ing list, and she reluc­tant­ly defies her par­ents and school to join a banned-book club that Talia is launching.

Rose’s devel­op­ing friend­ship with Talia changes Rose’s place in her small-town cul­ture. It cre­ates a rift with her life­long best friend Char­lotte, changes what Rose choos­es to wear, and affects which friends she hangs out with. These changes mean that Rose is grow­ing up, but is she doing so in healthy ways?

This is a book about ear­ly ado­les­cence, friend­ship, and about stand­ing up for one’s val­ues. Talia, Rose, and Char­lotte are strong char­ac­ters, and their tri­umphs and strug­gles will be of inter­est to many mid­dle grade readers.