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Chris Abani’s ‘Graceland’ removed from Florida reading list

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A parent’s complaint has removed Chris Abani’s novel ‘Graceland’ from the summer reading list for 10th-graders at Mandarin High School in Jacksonville, Fla.

Abani’s book, about a Nigerian boy and his transformation to city-tough Elvis impersonator, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award; it was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

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‘Graceland’ includes passages of brutal violence, but it is the sexual content of a torture scene that the Florida mother found objectionable.

She was ‘outraged,’ JAX-4 TV reported. The television station received an e-mail requesting that it investigate; the mother making the complaint did not appear in the report.

The book was one of three on the standard reading list for 10-graders, along with ‘Runner’ by Carl Deuker and ‘Purple Hibiscus’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, coming-of-age stories set in Seattle and Nigeria, respectively. Students were instructed to read two of the three books over the summer. Honors students had a slightly different list; Abani’s book appeared there as well.

Now Abani’s ‘Graceland’ has been pulled from the reading lists by Duval County public school officials.

Abani was born in Nigeria; more than once, his writing and work in the theater had him thrown in prison there. He is now a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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