Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park is wonderful. Like, seriously wonderful. This young adult romance novel published earlier this year is beloved by basically everyone who reads it (including me). No less than John Green, the massively popular author of The Fault in Our Stars and leader of an army of nerdfighters gave it a glowing review in the New York Times.

And now, a group of parents in Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin school district had the author disinvited from a speaking gig, and are trying to get the book banned from libraries as well. Just in time for Banned Books Week.

Bad idea, guys.

Teens need books like Eleanor & Park. Seriously. NEED them. The novel tells the story of the eponymous teen lovers: Eleanor, dirt poor and growing up in an abusive household, and Park, out of synch with his peers at school for his half-Asian heritage and weird (awesome) taste in music. Their high school in 1980s Nebraska just can’t let them be together, can’t understand why the quiet Asian kid would go for the chubby redhead in weird clothes—but he does, and for a time their romance is a refuge from the suffocating circumstances of their teen lives, from the bad stepdads and school bullies. It’s pitch perfect, one of the sweetest and saddest things you’ll ever read.

I can think of no book that would be more appropriate for the kids of Anoka-Hennepin—a school district that Rolling Stone said was waging war on gay teens after rampant bullying and a rash of suicides. Though Eleanor & Park does not address anti-gay bullying explicitly, its themes of kindness and love in the face of abuse and bullying, and of the hope of rising above your own difficult circumstances resonate. High school is a difficult place. I’m sure there are plenty of teens in the Anoka-Hennepin district, gay and straight, who would benefit from reading this book and listening to the author speak.

What makes this especially ridiculous is that the grounds for banning the book are extremely weak. There’s a bit of obscene language—mostly from Eleanor’s bullies and her abusive stepdad—and one scene in which Eleanor and Park go to second base but decide to go no further. Seriously, that’s it.

However, Rowell’s appearance fee was being funded by money from the Minnesota Legacy Amendment Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, frequently attacked by conservatives for spending money on the arts, which they find wasteful. I smell a conservative smear campaign, targeted less at the book than at public funding for arts in general. Which just makes my blood boil.

The backlash has already begun. I hope that school librarians, former Anoka-Hennepin students, and parents can speak up in defense of this great book, and for public funding of the arts. Books like Eleanor & Park are good for teens, for communities—and they’re worth supporting.