Mom Challenges School's
Offering Beginners' Love
The mother of a 15-year-old Chester (S.C.) High School student has asked the school board to remove Norma Klein's Beginners' Love from media center shelves because of the book's sexually explicit passages. The book remains in circulation pending the board's review of the challenge, slated for January 25.
Gracie Howell filed her complaint in December after her daughter, Jacqueline Rodabaugh, showed her a passage she found disturbing in the 1983 novel, which traces a teenaged boy's relationship with a sexually experienced girl. The behavior depicted—oral sex between the two central characters—represented “stuff people shouldn't be doing in their teen years,” Rodabaugh told the Columbia State December 11.
The Rock Hill Herald reported January 6 that faculty and classmates of the sophomore began attacking her after word of the complaint became public; the girl moved to Ohio to live with her father after students in one incident pelted her with pine cones.
Posted January 18, 1999.
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