It is also included on The Blue Hen List, a set of 10 books chosen by state librarians as good choices for summer reading. Morris Young Adult Debut Award it also made the 2013 Best Fiction for Young Adults list, issued by the Young Adult Library Services Association. The book, which weighs in at 480 pages, was a 2013 finalist for the William C.

“It’s a fraught love letter to growing up gay in rural Montana.” Like a lot of debut novels, she says, there’s a good slice of her own story woven into Cameron’s.Īt a time when young adult novels routinely deal with issues like sexuality and death, Cameron Post is hardly an anomaly. “I wanted it to be a great big coming of gay-age story,” Danforth says. At a time when students under 18 are still barred from entering R-rated movies, “adult themes” in school-assigned literature can raise concerns. Cameron struggles to resist the influence of her would-be mentors and maintain her sense of self. After her parents die in a car crash, her ultra-conservative aunt sends Cameron to God’s Promise, where legions of born-again counselors try to hammer her round peg into the square hole of heteronormativity.

There has to be some kind of compass.”Ĭameron Post is a bildungsroman with a twist: its eponymous character, a young girl growing up in rural Montana, is gay. We can’t have Hustler and Playboy and all those kinds of things. “Not everything is appropriate for a high school library. “The profanity is pretty extreme,” says board member Sandi Minard.

Perhaps spooked by controversy, the board voted to restore the book-then ditch the list altogether. The Cape school board, citing parent complaints about the book’s liberal use of the word “fuck,” struck Cameron Post from a summer reading list, prompting both praise and outrage within the tiny coastal community. Danforth’s edgy, sexual coming-of-age novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, was deemed too foul-mouthed, too racy, and possibly too gay for incoming freshmen at Cape Henlopen High School. A fictional young woman from Montana is causing raised eyebrows in Southern Delaware: Earlier this summer, the heroine of Emily M.

The miseducation of cameron post novel