This was the author's response to that. "She had strung together phrases from all over a chapter, but I still recognized the passage immediately. Creating it w

This was the author's response to that. "She had strung together phrases from all over a chapter, but I still recognized the passage immediately. Creating it was painful, one of many times in writing fiction that I’ve had to depict harm that I wish did not exist in the world. Told from the perspective of the senior class at an all-white high school, the section of the novel that Bell pulled from captures the crude fantasies and dehumanizing attitudes that swirl around my main character, the only Mexican American in her school in 1930s New London, Texas. I represent these views in the book so that I can reveal their toxic effect; I don’t endorse them."