Maggie Tokuda-Hall, author of the graphic novel “Squad,” came to Berkeley High School on Friday, Nov. 7, 2024, to discuss her career to BHS students. Tokuda-Hall spoke to students on the importance of children’s literature, the rising problem of book bans, the marginalization of queer characters, and how recent approved propositions will affect literature and schools.
“We were hoping that she would speak about book bans and attempts by publishers and school boards to censor books,” said Meredith Irby, a BHS librarian, “Things that we haven’t dealt with that much because we live in Berkeley. I think that it’s still really important for students to learn about the rise of book bans across the country and to learn about how some students don’t have access to a variety of texts that tell a variety of diverse stories. It was important for our students to learn about that perspective.”
Tokuda-Hall grew up in the Bay Area and went to Piedmont High School. She first started working with children’s literature when she worked at a book chain as a manager for the children’s department.
“I wrote ‘The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea’ starting when I was a bookseller. I used to steal time at my desk during my lunch hour to start writing. It took me about eight years to write ‘The Mermaid the Witch and the Sea’,” Tokuda-Hall told BHS students during her presentation, “At the time when I was writing, there weren’t a ton of queer books for teenagers available. Or if there were queer characters they were relegated to the side of the story and if they were romantically entwined with anyone, the likelihood of one of those characters dying was really high. I wanted to write a book that centered a queer romance that I felt like we deserved.” After writing “The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea,” Tokuda-Hall wrote her favorite graphic novel, “Squad.” Tokuda-Hall used her own high school experience at Piedmont High School as a loose inspiration for this Young Adult graphic novel, illustrated by Lisa Sterle.
“Fiction is one of those places where we can exercise our feelings, the ones which are the hardest to deal with,” Tokuda-Hall said as she talked about her reasons for writing “Squad.”
“When we face the injustices of the world and when we’re done moving through those feelings we are able to tackle those injustices with so much more strength, and that’s what ‘Squad’ was for. It’s revenge fantasy, it’s not here to tell you how to be better people or to fix the world. It is just here to allow you to feel anger because sometimes anger is the right reaction to what is happening around you,” Tokuda-Hall said.
After writing “Squad,” Tokuda-Hall wrote “Love in the Library,” as well as “The Siren, the Song, and the Spy,” and her most recent novel “The Worst Ronin,” published in May of 2024.
“She’s an author of Asian American Pacific Islander descent, and having an artist who is a published author, who also lives in the Bay Area come and talk to students, I think was very important. And it’s very important for Asian students specifically to see that there are Asian artists out in the community,” said Matthew Laurel, an Asian American Pacific Islander Literature teacher at BHS.
Tokuda-Hall also spoke about writing “Love in the Library”, a book based on her grandparents’ experience in Minidoka, a Japanese internment camp during World War II, and the push back she got from companies like Scholastic.
“Scholastic came to me with an offer and said we would like to offer you a license. But, there was a catch, it’s the author’s note which I wrote, they needed me to take some stuff out. They wanted me to remove an entire paragraph about how what happened was not an isolated experience. Not only that, they wanted me to remove the word racism from the author’s note altogether,” Tokuda-Hall said.
She said no to Scholastic’s offer, wanting to send a message to other authors, allowing them to feel safer to reject deals like this one.
Tokuda-Hall also spoke about her work as a founding member leader of The Authors Against Book Bans. She said that book bans have jumped exponentially over recent years.
“We often talk about books as windows and mirrors students should be able to see their own experiences (through), and then also reflect on other peoples experiences that are very different from their own,” Allyson Bogie, a BHS librarian said, “It’s really disturbing to think that kids would be denied access to the information, to the books that we believe are really important.”