“I wanted it to be a great big coming of gay-age story,” Danforth says. “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.

At a time when young adult novels routinely deal with issues like sexuality and death, Cameron Post is hardly an anomaly. The book, which weighs in at 480 pages, was a 2013 finalist for the William C. Morris Young Adult Debut Award; it also made the 2013 Best Fiction for Young Adults list, issued by the Young Adult Library Services Association. It is also included on The Blue Hen List, a set of 10 books chosen by state librarians as good choices for summer reading. The list includes mainstream YA fiction like John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars—a story narrated by a teenage cancer patient—as well as quirkier works like Erin Jade Lange’s Butter, in which a lonely, obese boy plans to live-stream his suicide-by-overeating on the Internet.

At Cape Henlopen High School, where surfer kids from the coastal communities of Lewes and Rehoboth Beach mingle with the children of farmers, this year’s 314 incoming freshmen were given the Blue Hen List and required to pick one of the 10 books, read it, and write an essay over the summer. Honors students had to pick two. On June 4, a district parent emailed board members and district officials “shocked and appalled” by the Blue Hen List, and Cameron Post in particular. “We expected to see classics like Of Mice and Men or Lord Of The Flies,” the parent says. Instead, Cameron Post seemed to be “a roadmap or guide book on how to become a sexually active lesbian teen.”

Board member Spencer Brittingham picked up Cameron Post to see for himself. The book stunned him. “I’ve been running the scenes in my head constantly,” he says.

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As executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, Joan Bertin says she sees about one case of book-banning or attempted censorship per week. “Censorship is using its power and authority and influence to approve certain ideas and disapprove others,” she says. “It’s the government putting its finger on the ideological scales.”

Minard vigorously denies the charge of censorship. Cameron Post sits in the library at Cape Henlopen High School, she says. The board didn’t ban the book; it simply refused to endorse it. “If it was geared towards an older student, I wouldn’t have been so adamant about it. But when we’re talking about incoming freshmen, you have to be more selective about the language and the sexual content.”

Bertin says she hears the “age-appropriate” argument often. “What educators generally mean is, does the child have the intellectual and emotional maturity to process the information?” Ulysses is not age-appropriate for 4th grade readers not because of its mature content, but because 6th graders aren’t mature enough to put it in context. Physics is not age-appropriate because it requires math skills not yet taught. Most freshmen are emotionally and intellectually capable of putting Cameron Post’s rough edges in context, Bertin says; it’s their day-to-day.