Already Read It! : A "Novel" Game 37

Can you guess the title and author of the novel depicted in the picture?

DIFFICULTY : Hard

CLUE : Some might suggest this poignant novel makes a great case against animal experimentation. But is that really the novel's main idea?

     This novel holds a poignant moment in my life which is sort of hard to explain. I was thirty-four and had just began my substituting career. One of the first Language Arts classes I subbed, a seventh grade classroom, was reading this novel. When I perused the novel's materials, attempting to familiarize myself with its content because I had never read it, I vaguely had memories of hearing the title, maybe mentioned on a television show or by another avid reader or most likely another novel, but I didn't think much of the novel at this time. 

     When class began and the discussion took off, because these students were enjoying the read, I wondered why I hadn't read the novel during my younger years in education. The story interested me enough so I went and procured a copy from the library and began reading it that night. As I read I was smacked directly in the face with a truth I hadn't been aware of for twenty-eight years: private education, at a catholic school, was utterly lacking. I couldn't believe I hadn't read this novel during my private education; the simple reason why: censorship. The novel had adult themes, involving love and sex, intelligence and free thinking, control and influence, and I could go on and on. I felt cheated. I felt lacking. I hurt. I hurt because the religion I was raised in, the religion I had discarded many years ago, had kept me from reading this eye-opening and thought validating novel for twenty-eight years. It held many of the beliefs I already owned, many of the ideas I was floating around in my brain, and it even supplied a few new ones, of course. From this point on, I promoted public school education with fervor. I mean, I never promoted catholic education or private education much before this, but now, now I was forced to acknowledge just how amazing a public school education would have been for my sponge-like brain. Who knows how I would have turned out if I went to my local school.

     One of the most influential ideas in the novel, one I had already been pondering, and has stuck with me over the years, is the idea of how words only hold the meanings we give them, the power we assign, and sooner or later, someone somewhere would find fault in these meanings and attempt to change them; basically, labeling was pointless and it was pointless to get upset over labels because eventually they would change and eventually someone else from a younger generation would disagree with the new labels and change them again: the old arugment between denotation and connotation (connotation always wins, by the way). Below is the passage I'm refering to, in case you are confused as to what I am blathering on about:

“Am I a genius? I don't think so. Not yet anyway. As Burt would put it, mocking the euphemisms of educational jargon, I'm exceptional—a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of gifted and deprived (which used to mean bright and retarded) and as soon as exceptional begins to mean anything to anyone they'll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn't mean anything to anybody. Exceptional refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I've been exceptional.”