The book, published in 2017, is a commentary on the experience of young black-Americans, focusing on a 16-year old-girl as she navigates life between her poor neighbourhood and white, affluent classmates at school.<\/p>\n
Debuting at number one on the New York Times’ young adult best-seller list, it describes police brutality and racial bias, as one of her best friends is shot by a white police officer.<\/p>\n
In the year it was published, it was one of the top ten most-challenged books in the US by schools and libraries who listed profanity, drug use, and sexual references as a reason to ban it, according to the American Library Association.<\/p>\n
Speaking to BBC Radio Solent’s Dorset Breakfast show, Mr Farquharson said the school held sessions where pupils would read aloud to the class.<\/p>\n
He said: “I’m sure a 14-year-old girl or boy should not be expected to stand in front of their peers and read out some of the stuff you can find in this book.<\/p>\n
“They shouldn’t be normalising the sorts of sexual activity that’s happening – and the language – to kids in their class.”<\/p>\n
Mr Farquharson said the book depicted white people “as the baddies”, adding: “The concern I have is they are not balancing that out… and they might come away with an understanding that they are inherently baddies.”<\/p>\n
A school spokesperson said: “We acknowledge that the novel raises important themes and is promoted as appropriate for readers that are aged 14-plus, however, after careful consideration, we have decided that there are alternative texts that raise similar themes which are better suited to our students in Year 10.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The book, published in 2017, is a commentary on the experience of young black-Americans, focusing on a 16-year…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":163902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":["post-163901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}