Books for young people-in this case mine-have been seized upon as fireballs to lob in a larger clash between cultural values. Bell and others like her, which focus overwhelmingly on books that feature or are written by non-White, queer, and otherwise non-dominant people. I think something similar is at work when it comes to the censorship efforts of Ms. The presence of non-white children landed as a threat to these parents because it signaled that their values, their worldview, their preferences, their ideologies were being shifted from the center of American life. Bell’s performance of outrage in that it neatly mirrors (almost comically so) the kinds of speeches that white parents enacted in the South when black or brown students attended (or attempted to attend) schools with their white children. Given the role of segregation in the novel, there’s a kind of grim irony to Ms. I didn’t create those conditions nor do I endorse them, but in writing a historical novel, I needed to represent them. The voice of “The Gang” is disgusting and crude on purpose it allowed me, in a few pages, to convey the treatment that Naomi experiences day in and out without subjecting readers to the quantity of abuse on the page that would have been needed to approach realism. The point is to show, in condensed form, the kind of ideas, stereotypes, and attitudes that circulated freely at this time with regard to women and, particularly, “Mexican” women. It’s from one of a handful of passages narrated by “The Gang,” a kind of nasty locker room equivalent of a Greek chorus.

Bell claims is “teaching anal sex” is a device to introduce the reader to the relentless objectification, sexualization, and harassment the female main character experiences as the one Mexican American in a white high school in 1936 East Texas. To be clear, the passage from Out of Darkness that Ms. Since the Kara Bell/Lake Travis school board video has gone viral, responses to her behavior divide pretty neatly into two categories: those mocking her outrage and skewed conclusions and those celebrating her for protecting children from “pornographic” material. (I recommend the audiobook, beautifully narrated by Benita Robledo and Lincoln Hoppe, instead.)

I love experiencing literature read aloud, but hearing an agitated woman read a passage from Out of Darkness in a Texas school board meeting before launching into a loosely connected tirade about anal sex-that was not what I would have hoped for.

Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez