Matt Haig's Midnight Library and Khaled Hosseini's Thousand Splendid Suns

In February, my 10th grade class was about 2/3 of the way through Kaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, (in the scene just before Amir finds Sohrab as a prisoner of Assef), when all of a sudden two assistant principals walk into the class telling me that Kite Runner has been banned by the district and that I needed to gather all copies of it and pivot to teaching something else. Many of the students were angered by this, as they had, by this point, invested in the story and would like to see some sort of happy resolution for Sohrab and Amir. Since then I have wondered what to teach in its place. My girlfriend in Western Australia has a copy of Hosseini's Thousand Splendid Suns, which has not yet been banned in any district in Texas. In Kite Runner, I loved how well he described Afghanistan of the 1970s before the years of warfare and Taliban turned the country into hell on earth. I thought if Thousand Splendid Suns turned out to be a teachable story, I could reuse my lesson on Afghan history, geography and ethnography, so I read it. It was superbly written, but I find it less teachable. The female characters Maryam and Laila don't exercise a lot of agency until late in the book when Laila braved lashings and beatings to visit her daughter in the orphanage, and when they finally stood up to Rasheed. Maryam becomes the very model of bravery and heroism, but this is so late in the book and a less teachable arc than Amir's betrayals and redemption narrative. My girlfriend also had a copy of Matt Haig's Midnight Library which I read with interest. The main character had, like myself, studied philosophy as an undergraduate. It was sophomoric in the sense that of all the people she would have studied, she would be so fixated on Thoreau, who most people encounter in high school rather than in college courses. Why not Hegel, Kant or Wittgenstein? But sophomoric might just be perfect for my sophomores. This book is highly teachable and accessible to a high school audience. It shows (sometimes in a heavy-handed fashion) that choices have consequences and that life is full of endless possibilities, no matter how stuck you may feel. So I am filling out the requisite paperwork to teach this one and hope the answer will be "yes." It does have a few cuss words and a few non-explicit references to sex, so the puritans trying to run Texas schools (and those district curricular decision makers who fear the puritans might fire them) might say no.