The hippos ban the giraffes in Raj Haldar’s new image e book This Book Is Banned.

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The hippos ban the giraffes in Raj Haldar’s new image e book This Book Is Banned.

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A foolish new kids’s image e book introduces little children to a critical matter.

This Book Is Banned by Raj Haldar with footage by Julia Patton is not actually about books being faraway from libraries. It’s about banning such random issues as unicorns, avocados and previous curler skates.

Haldar was partly impressed to write down This Book Is Banned due to one thing that occurred to him after his first e book was printed in 2018.

Haldar’s P Is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever is all about silent letters and different spelling quirks. For the letter “O,” he used the phrase “Ouija”…and ended up getting some hate mail.

Raj Haldar needs his “silly” new image e book to assist children “understand…the dangers of censorship but…also have fun.”

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Raj Haldar needs his “silly” new image e book to assist children “understand…the dangers of censorship but…also have fun.”

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“Ouija is a silly game that people play on Halloween. You know, they try to talk to ghosts,” Haldar says incredulously. “But I’ve gotten emails where I have been called a ‘tool of Satan.'”

Haldar shared one such electronic mail with NPR. It’s not household pleasant.

In the meantime, whereas P Is for Pterodactyl grew to become a best-seller, Haldar began performing some analysis on e book bans.

“One of the really kind of important moments in my journey with this book was reading about the book And Tango Makes Three, a true story about two penguins on the Central Park Zoo who undertake a child penguin,” says Haldar, who grew up in New Jersey, simply outdoors of Manhattan.

Two male penguins, to be actual. For a time, And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson was one of many most challenged books within the nation, based on the American Library Association.

“Seeing that freedom to read is being trampled on in this way, like I needed to create something that could help [kids] contend with the idea of book bans and understand the dangers of censorship,” says Haldar, “but allowing kids to also have fun.”

In This Book Is Banned, there are many sound results phrases that youngsters can learn aloud, nutty photos of a robotic on curler skates and the Three Little Pigs flip The Big Bad Wolf into The Little Nice Wolf.

Inspired by image books that break the fourth wall, Raj Haldar warns readers they may not just like the ending of This Book Is Banned.

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Haldar additionally breaks the fourth wall, a method he beloved in books he learn rising up. One of his favorites was The Monster at the End of this Book which he calls “this sort of meta picture book where, like, the book itself is trying to kind of dissuade you from getting to the end of the book.”

In This Book Is Banned, the narrator warns younger readers, “Are you sure you want to keep reading?” and, “I don’t think you want to know what happens at the end though…”

And that simply makes children need to get there much more.

“Kids, in general, they’re always trying to, you know, push at the edges of…what what they can discover and know about,” says Haldar.

The proof is clear. For children and adults alike, nothing says “read me” just like the phrases “banned book.”

This story was edited for radio and digital by Meghan Sullivan. The radio story was produced by Isabella Gomez Sarmiento.