important update

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The novel opens with a recount of the rape of a boy's mother. The soldier describes her "sugary cunt."

Two pre-teen boys are told to hold down another boy while he is raped by a 17-year-old.

The aftermath of the rape describes the "dark stain in the seat of his pants" and the "tiny drops that fell from between his legs and stained the snow black." The boy is bleeding from his rectum.

A father finds his dead son and decides to commit suicide by placing the barrel of a gun into his own mouth and blowing his brains out.

Children are sold to pedophiles. Farid tries to kill the salesman. The children watch. 

Pedophile nibbles his purchased child's ear and then encourages another man to try out boys too.

Child Sohrab uses a slingshot to launch a metal pellet into his master's eye, leaving an empty socket where the eye was. 

People visit a restaurant near the place of a public hanging of a young man. His body dangles from a rope. No one notices.

After some executions, corpses are collected and transported by a pickup truck. They are then tossed into holes and quickly buried. 

“He must enter her surreptitiously, lifting the hem of her nightgown only to her navel. He must rest his weight on his elbows when they make love, to avoid hurting her breasts…When she senses some spasm about to grip him, she will make rapid movements with her hips, press her fingernails into his back, suck in her breath, and pretend she is having an orgasm. She might wonder again, for the six hundredth time, what it would be like to have that feeling while her husband’s penis is inside her.”

“Then he will lean his head down and bite my t** ... I want him to put his hand between my legs, I want him to open them for me... I stretch my legs open, and he is on top of me…He would die rather than take his thing out of me. Of me. I take my fingers out of his and put my hands on his behind…” 

“With a violence born of total helplessness, he pulled her dress up, lowered his trousers and underwear. ‘I said get on wid it. An’make it good, n*****, Come on c***. Faster. You ain’t doing nothing for her.’ He almost wished he could do it—hard, long, and painfully, he hated her so much.”  

“A bolt of desire ran down his genitals…and softening the lips of his anus. . . . He wanted to f*** her—tenderly. But the tenderness would not hold. The tightness of her vagina was more than he could bear. His soul seemed to slip down his guts and fly out into her, and the gigantic thrust he made into her then provoked the only sound she made. Removing himself from her was so painful to him he cut it short and snatched his genitals out of the dry harbor of her vagina. She appeared to have fainted.”

“He further limited his interests to little girls. They were usually manageable . . . His sexuality was anything but lewd; his patronage of little girls smacked of innocence and was associated in his mind with cleanliness.” And later, this same pedophile notes, “I work only through the Lord. He sometimes uses me to help people.”

“The little girls are the only things I’ll miss. Do you know that when I touched their sturdy little t*** and bit them—just a little—I felt I was being friendly?—If I’d been hurting them, would they have come back? . . . they’d eat ice cream with their legs open while I played with them. It was like a party.”

GCISD administrators explain the process for choosing instructional materials. They are changing how they communicate about these materials to the public. Broader communication will now be sought that seeks parent and community feedback!

The district will be reviewing all recommended reading for 6th-12th grade, this time utilizing parent and community feedback, and they will complete this process prior to the start of the Spring semester of 2022. Moving forward, they will also ensure that parents are now properly notified of students' book choice options.