…after looking into this book and a lot of its content, I’m not sure how anyone could argue that it’s acceptable for being on school shelves. It’s got some pretty crude scenes that I can understand schools not wanting to endorse.
Honestly? Grow up, dude. Writing about something is not the same thing as endorsing it, and making a book with crude—which is a highly relative term, by the way—content available to students does not mean endorsement of that content either.
If we were to do away with any and all icky or crude books containing containing that we think teenagers are too immature to understand or evaluate, we would be excluding a wide swath of classic and highly regarded literature. Maya Angelou is out, surely—sexual assault on a young girl is very crude and not something any teenager has experienced before. Nightwood and The Color Purple should be thrown out for depicting lesbianism, which some parents would not want their teenage children to know about, much less be influenced by. What about violence? Drug use? Foul language? All subjects that could be construed as crude, and yet many books you’ll already find at a school library are full of them.
If you’re so concerned about what your child is reading, then talk to them about it.
I was obsessed with The Horse and His Boy as a child.