The war of words surrounding children’s book The Shepherd’s Granddaughter (Groundwood Books) has escalated, with a Toronto District School Board trustee calling on the country’s largest school board to ban the book and to suspend its involvement with the Ontario Library Association, which is promoting the book as part of its province-wide Forest of Reading program.

Toronto Centre-Rosedale trustee Sheila Ward, who admits she hasn’t read the novel, told the Jewish Tribune last week that she will move heaven and earth to have The Shepherd’s Granddaughter taken off the school library shelves. Ward also alleged an anti-Israel bias on the part of the OLA, which selected a similarly controversial book, Deborah Ellis’ Three Wishes (also published by Groundwood), for the Forest of Reading in 2007. From the Jewish Tribune:

“This is the second book in three years […] that has made a winning list [on the OLA] and that in my view is biased against the Israeli people, [Ward] continued. One can be a genuine mistake; two is a pattern. I’d like an investigation. Until I have some really hard answers, I’d like to suspend our involvement with the OLA.

Groundwood publisher Patsy Aldana has responded to Ward’s comments in an open letter to TDSB director of education Chris Spence, reminding him of the TDSB’s “duty to integrate and reflect the multiple communities which make up this city.” From Aldana’s letter:

Librarians are a bulwark for freedom of speech. They are the most effective reading promoters we have. The TDSB should be lauding them and supporting them unconditionally “ not allowing this kind of attack upon them.

Written by Toronto librarian and teacher Anne Laurel Carter, The Shepherd’s Granddaughter is told from the perspective of a young Palestinian girl whose family’s land and home is destroyed by Israeli settlers. The TDSB first received a complaint about the book last month. The book has since been condemned by Jewish advocacy groups B’nai B’rith and Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies (read Quillblog’s report).