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The text that Kaia Alexander received on Thursday was not from some right-wing group bent on banning books in schools in the supposed name of liberty and parental rights.
It was from her 11-year-old son’s fifth-grade teacher at Skyline Elementary School in Solana Beach, California. And it was about a novel that the boy had picked out with her on a trip to a bookstore. Alexander is a single mom and a writer whose work has ranged from screenplays to a novel about the events leading up to the burning of the great library in Alexandria, Egypt. Her son’s name is Atticus, the name of the crusading father in To Kill a Mockingbird.
The teacher wrote: “Hi, are you aware that Atticus brought a copy of Cujo by Stephen King to school today? This is the Goodreads write-up: ‘This book deals with mature themes, contains a decent amount of strong language, depicts pretty graphic violence, and has fairly explicit sexual acts. Definitely a book intended for adults.’”
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