Acclaimed author Julia Alvarez has weighed in on the Tillamook School District’s decision to remove her classic coming-of-age novel, “How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents” from the syllabus of its 10th grade honor English class.

In a letter to the Tillamook County Pioneer, a digital news source, Alvarez, now 74 and a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College in Vermont, wrote that “to cancel books and eliminate voices from our schools and libraries undermines a core value in education: to create thoughtful, well-informed, big-hearted imaginations in our students.”

Her novel, published in 1991, remains available in the Tillamook High library.

Alvarez wrote that she was inspired to write “Garcia Girls” because, as a young girl going to school in the United States after having fled a dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, she couldn’t find any stories that spoke to her own background. The book, which includes sexual content, follows four sisters through their journey of assimilation and independence, moving counterclockwise from adulthood to childhood.

“Part of my motivation in writing that first novel was to try to understand through character and story the challenges we faced as a family,” Alvarez wrote to the Tillamook County news outlet. “It was the novel I wished I had been able to read and share with my classmates in the hope that it would deepen our understanding of each other.”

A handful of parents and students in Tillamook objected to the descriptions of sexual intimacy in Alvarez’s novel, as well as a scene in which a stranger exposes himself to one of the sisters, prompting emotional debate over whether the book should be read by 10th grade students. Eventually, the school board voted 3-1 to pull the book from the course’s reading list, acting on a recommendation from the district’s curriculum review committee.

In Tillamook, the question over whether to keep Alvarez’s book on the list of course materials will prompt a policy committee review of the coastal school district’s policies on curriculum adoptions and complaints, according to a memo distributed by Superintendent Matt Ellis after the decision. Policy committee member Tiffany Jacob told The Oregonian/OregonLive last week that she would prefer to keep conversations about sex and sexuality to health education classes.

The controversy in Tillamook is not the first time that book bans have surfaced in Oregon school districts, but it is unusual in that the school board’s decision impacted classroom materials, and not just library books.

Alvarez went on to publish several more novels, collections of essays and poetry and books for young readers.

“Having come from a dictatorship where books were censored and discussions were discouraged, I know how important it is that we protect not just our homes, communities and borders but also our bookshelves,” Alvarez concluded in her email to the Tillamook County Pioneer. “Stories are our shared legacy as a human family and our children are the poorer for being prevented from claiming that heritage.”