Given the delicacy of such matters there, I wonder how long will it be before American school governors start playing their own version of Kristallnacht with it, as with so many other novels?
The British author Bernadine Everisto* recently gave her thoughts in a radio essay, following her latest novel,
Girl, Woman, Other having been banned by some Dakota school-board that even called for it to be burned; hence my historical reference.
Highlighting also the laziness of slang like "woke" and "cancel", used without thought, she listed many other novels similarly expunged from US schools; including even ones regarded as 20C American literature classics. She did not though, really explain why the school governors think hers is so evil (in their view).
Born in 1959 so probably too young to remember the
Lady Chatterley's Lover trial fiasco as it happened, she added from her own experience that anyway the best way to encourage anyone, especially teenagers, to read any given book, is to ban it!
Indeed, she said one of the other authors she cited has even offered free copies of his excluded novel to students for whom it would have been a set novel.
I understand that D.H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover, about an extra-marital affair between "lady" and servant, has subsequently been among the set books for some UK senior school English Literature syllabi.
+++++
*From Wikipedia:
Awarded an OBE, novellist Bernadino Everisto is also:
Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other,[1] won the Booker Prize in 2019, making her the first black woman and the first black British person to win the Booker.... , [and] ... is a longstanding advocate for the inclusion of writers and artists of colour.
