Book Club Discussion Post: Class Act

Welcome to our Banned Graphic Novels book club! This go round we’ve selected three graphic novels that have been banned or challenged for various reasons. Each of our books –Class Act by Jerry Craft, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, and This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki – have their own Discussion Posts. Even if you weren’t able to get your review written yet, don’t worry – all are welcome here in this post’s comments or our Social Media platform discussions where we’ll have some additional prompts so please join us there as well.

Registered participants in this year’s Cannonball Read 15 can join the #CannonBookClub Zoom Book Club on Saturday October 7 at 6 pm EDT/ 3 pm PDT. Those Cannonballers should have already received connection details by email. (Contact us if you haven’t!) If you’re not registered, but would like to; please drop us a line to get signed up and receive the Zoom details.

For those of you returning or who might be joining in for #CannonBookClub for the first time (hello new friends!) all are welcome, you don’t have to be registered for CBR15. The topics are numbered, so please refer to them below by that number to help people find the conversations they are looking for; and only respond to one topic per comment to help keep things clear. If you are responding to someone else’s thoughts, please try to reply directly to that comment.

Onto the questions:

1. What is the difference between banning a book and restricting access to a book (e.g., requiring parental permission)?
2. How do racism and stereotyping shape the lives of Drew, Jordan, and Liam?
3. What were your thoughts about the sections showing Jordan’s original comics? Did they add to the overall story?
4. Drew and Jordan struggle with feeling seen during the course of Class Act. Do you think the need to ‘feel seen’ changes as we get older?
5. Drew faces microaggressions throughout the book, which ones could you relate to?
6. Do the reasons listed for challenges (fear it would teach young readers Critical Race Theory) to Class Act seem valid to you?
7. I’ve got something to talk about that isn’t covered above, meet me in the comments!