Paging the Detroit mother who boycotted the reading of Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl” by her daughter’s seventh-grade class on the grounds that it’s pornographic. Get a load of what tenth graders at Buena High School in Sierra Vista, Ariz., were reading up until this past week. Rather than just give the book’s title, here is a small sampling of the content courtesy of EAGNews:
Hugo and Felicia stripped in their room, dissolving easily into one another, and made love against the whitewashed walls. Hugo bit Felicia’s breast and left purplish bands of bruises on her upper thighs. He knelt before her in the tub and massaged black Spanish soap between her legs. He entered her repeatedly from behind.
Felicia learned what pleased him. She tied his arms above his head with their underclothing and slapping him sharply when he asked.
‘You’re my bitch,’ Hugo said, groaning.
In the morning he left, promising to return in the summer.
The district has since pulled the book from which this steamy passage was excerpted. The title is “Dreaming in Cuban,” and it is one of the recommended titles in the hotly debated “Common Core Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects.”
So what would prompt educators to place a book like this in the hands of high school students? One clue is the identity of the author, Cristina Garcia, who is (a) a woman, (b) of Cuban and Guatemalan extraction, and (c) grew up in an ethnically mixed neighborhood of New York City. She is in fine the poster child for diversity, multiculturalism, and feminism, all rolled into one. The fact that she occasionally uses potty mouth in her prose is quite irrelevant.
That is assuming, of course, that the developers of the Common Core Curriculum read the novel. Whether they did seems beside the point since, as EAG notes, supplemental material in the curriculum includes an interview with the author, who is pushing her latest oeuvre, “King of Cuba.” A promotional blurb for the book, which describes it as “darkly hilarious” reveals that its protagonist is an octogenarian living out his final years with “an active sex life.” Sounds even kinkier.
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