[It is only right for me to give you a warning up front about the subject of this post. It is what is commonly referred to as "adult content". And while I feel compelled to give you this warning, the local high school did not feel it necessary to give anything similar to students or parents.]
I guess I am still living in the past - the age when a parent didn't need to question the reading material the local schools were assigning for English class.
My youngest is a junior this year and taking Advanced Placement English Literature.
For some reason, I assumed the teacher would be assigning Dickens and Austen and Shakespeare.
Instead, we got Exit West.
Like me, you might be unfamiliar with this title and its author, Mohsin Hamid. Apparently Exit West is an "instant classic" dating all the way back to 2017.
This book didn't register on my radar until Sarah started complaining about being required to read it.
In the past, if students complained about a book assigned by their English teacher, like The Scarlet Letter, it was because it was "boring" or the vocabulary was unfamiliar.
Those were not Sarah's problem with Exit West. Her complaints had to do with characters dropping the F word and the graphic violence and descriptions of sex.
The lead female character - no Juliet to be sure - pressures her boyfriend to have sex, but he refuses until they are married. Her reply is "Are you f***ing kidding?" She has to settle for the two of them lying in bed "pleasuring" each other. There is also talk of anal sex practiced by the lead male's parents (his mother finds it "erotic" in case you were wondering) and an incident involving the sexual assault of the female character by an anonymous man taking advantage of a bustling crowd to "finger" her.
The story takes place in an unspecified city being torn apart by "militants". The lead male character's mother loses a "quarter of her head" to a gunshot. A man is beheaded and his decapitated body hung from a lamppost upside down by his shoestrings.
In the midst of his portrayal of the violence - as is common among authors of great literature - Hamid works in positive references to marijuana and psychedelic mushroom use.
Those are the highlights of the first 80 pages or so, anyway. I wish I had read it before Sarah started into it, but it never occurred to me. I would have suggested she ask the teacher for an alternative.
It makes me sick to think she has been exposed to such garbage.
Intentionally!
Today's adults sure are doing a number on this next generation.
I guess I need to pull my head out of the past ... but it causes more than a bit of anxiety about the future of our nation when I do so.
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