Abandoned by user

I was going to insert a quote here, but decided not to because I want to wait until the end to post about the whole thing. The quote I wanted to include might mislead readers into thinking that this book is much more titillating than it actually is, which would do it a disservice. 

I'm going to, for a moment, let emily danforth speak for herself about her book:

"The Miseducation of Cameron Post is very much a coming-of-age novel—that’s the form it was always meant to take—but there are, of course, a variety of ways to present the full and complicated lives of non-straight characters in fiction beyond the coming-of-age narrative, and I want to try them all. Desire and attraction and sexuality are always, to my mind, pretty messy and interesting, so even if I write a novel about a thirty-something who is fully out of the closet and has been for years (and all her friends, colleagues, and family know it and are accepting and blah, blah, blah) that doesn’t mean that there’s no “queer” component to the story, it’s just a different kind of story about a different kind of character than is the coming-of-age novel." (in an interview with lambda literary. full text here).

This is the book that I chose to read for Banned Book Week - and while I started it during the week, it was at the tail end, and I am not finished. I picked it because it was the center of controversy in Delaware this summer, when the Cape Henlopen school board removed it from a reading list after a parent freaked out about his/her 9th grader reading it, ostensibly because the book contained the word "fuck."

It does contain the word fuck. A fair few times. Cam, being a girl growing up in the 1990's, orphaned when both of her parents die in a car accident, does indeed drop an f-bomb now and then. As do her friends. Cam is also a lesbian teen, and the book centers around her identity, both hidden and revealed.

To be continued . . .