Banned and Challenged Books
Join us in the fight against censorship by picking up these frequently banned and challenged books by underrepresented authors. Take a look at the full list below!
A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST!
This poignant, bestselling verse novel gives voice to a young girl robbed of her childhood yet determined to find the strength to triumph.
Lakshmi is a thirteen-year-old girl who lives with her family in a small hut on a mountain in Nepal. Though desperately poor, her life is full of simple pleasures, like playing hopscotch with her best friend from school, and having her mother brush her hair by the light of an oil lamp. But when the harsh Himalayan monsoons wash away all that remains of the family’s crops, Lakshmi’s stepfather says she must leave home and take a job to support her family.
He introduces her to a glamorous stranger who tells her she will find her a job as a maid in the city. Glad to be able to help, Lakshmi journeys to India and arrives at “Happiness House” full of hope. But she soon learns the unthinkable truth: she has been sold into prostitution.
An old woman named Mumtaz rules the brothel with cruelty and cunning. She tells Lakshmi that she is trapped there until she can pay off her family’s debt-then cheats Lakshmi of her meager earnings so that she can never leave.
Lakshmi’s life becomes a nightmare from which she cannot escape. Still, she lives by her mother’s words—Simply to endure is to triumph—and gradually, she forms friendships with the other girls that enable her to survive in this terrifying new world. Then the day comes when she must make a decision-will she risk everything for a chance to reclaim her life?
Written in spare and evocative vignettes by the co-author of I Am Malala (Young Readers Edition), this powerful novel renders a world that is as unimaginable as it is real, and a girl who not only survives but triumphs.
* “Hard-hitting … The author beautifully balances the harshness of brothel life with the poignant relationships among its residents.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
* “An unforgettable account of sexual slavery as it exists now.” —Booklist (starred review)
Publishers Weekly Best 100 Books of the Year
NPR’s Best Books of the Year
American Library Association Top Ten List, Best Books of the Year
Gustav-Heinemann Peace Prize
Booklist Editor’s Choice Award
New York Public Library Best Books for Teens
Children’s Literature Council’s Choice
Book Sense Pick
A stunning, heartbreaking novel about grief, love, and family, perfect for fans of Jandy Nelson and Celeste Ng.
One of Time magazine‘s “100 Best YA Books of All Time”
“Emily X.R. Pan’s brilliantly crafted, harrowing first novel portrays the vast spectrum of love and grief with heart-wrenching beauty and candor. This is a very special book.” —John Green, bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down
Leigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird. Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents. And as she grieves, she must try to reconcile the fact that on the same day she kissed her best friend and longtime secret crush, Axel, her mother was taking her own life.
Alternating between real and magic, past and present, friendship and romance, hope and despair, The Astonishing Color of After is a stunning and heartbreaking novel about finding oneself through family history, art, grief, and love.
It began in a bedroom in Naples, Florida, when a misbehaving punk teenager named Tom Gabel, armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a headful of anarchist politics, landed on a riff. Gabel formed Against Me! and rocketed the band from its scrappy beginnings-banging on a drum kit made of pickle buckets-to a major-label powerhouse that critics have called this generation’s The Clash. Since its inception in 1997, Against Me! has been one of punk’s most influential modern bands, but also one of its most divisive. With every notch the four-piece climbed in their career, they gained new fans while infuriating their old ones. They suffered legal woes, a revolving door of drummers, and a horde of angry, militant punks who called them “sellouts” and tried to sabotage their shows at every turn.
But underneath the public turmoil, something much greater occupied Gabel-a secret kept for 30 years, only acknowledged in the scrawled-out pages of personal journals and hidden in lyrics. Through a troubled childhood, delinquency, and struggles with drugs, Gabel was on a punishing search for identity. Not until May of 2012 did a Rolling Stone profile finally reveal it: Gabel is a transsexual, and would from then on be living as a woman under the name Laura Jane Grace.
Tranny is the intimate story of Against Me!’s enigmatic founder, weaving the narrative of the band’s history, as well as Grace’s, with dozens of never-before-seen entries from the piles of journals Grace kept. More than a typical music memoir about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll-although it certainly has plenty of that-Tranny is an inside look at one of the most remarkable stories in the history of rock.
When Darnell Moore was fourteen, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they thought he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn’t the last time he would face death.
Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer, a leading Black Lives Matter activist, and an advocate for justice and liberation. In No Ashes in the Fire, he shares the journey taken by that scared, bullied teenager who not only survived, but found his calling. Moore’s transcendence over the myriad forces of repression that faced him is a testament to the grace and care of the people who loved him, and to his hometown, Camden, NJ, scarred and ignored but brimming with life. Moore reminds us that liberation is possible if we commit ourselves to fighting for it, and if we dream and create futures where those who survive on society’s edges can thrive.
No Ashes in the Fire is a story of beauty and hope-and an honest reckoning with family, with place, and with what it means to be free.
47 is a young slave boy living under the watchful eye of a brutal slave master. His life seems doomed until he meets a mysterious runaway slave, Tall John. 47 finds himself swept up in a struggle for his own liberation.
Sharon Flake’s award-winning, empowering debut novel follows one girl’s struggle toward self acceptance, no matter what the world throws her way. Includes a foreword by bestselling, award-winning author Jason Reynolds!
Maleeka suffers every day from the taunts of the other kids in her class. If they’re not getting at her about her homemade clothes or her good grades, it’s about her dark, black skin. Maleeka does whatever she can to try and fit in and fly under the radar. But it’s never enough.
When a new teacher, whose face is blotched with a startling white patch, starts at their school, Maleeka can see there is bound to be trouble for her too. But the new teacher’s attitude surprises Maleeka. Miss Saunders loves the skin she’s in. Can Maleeka learn to do the same?
★ “Flake’s debut novel will hit home.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
Ijeoma Oluo offers a revelatory examination of race in America in this #1 New York Times bestseller.
“Simply put: Ijeoma Oluo is a necessary voice and intellectual for these times, and any time, truth be told.” -Phoebe Robinson, New York Times bestselling author of You Can’t Touch My Hair
Protests against racial injustice and white supremacy have galvanized millions around the world. The stakes for transformative conversations about race could not be higher. Still, the task ahead seems daunting, and it’s hard to know where to start. How do you tell your boss her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law hang up on you when you had questions about police reform? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend?
In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from police brutality and cultural appropriation to the model minority myth in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race, and about how racism infects every aspect of American life.
A stunning novel on love, identity, loss, and redemption.
When Suzette comes home to Los Angeles from her boarding school in New England, she’s isn’t sure if she’ll ever want to go back. L.A. is where her friends and family are (as well as her crush, Emil). And her stepbrother, Lionel, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, needs her emotional support.
But as she settles into her old life, Suzette finds herself falling for someone new…the same girl her brother is in love with. When Lionel’s disorder spirals out of control, Suzette is forced to confront her past mistakes and find a way to help her brother before he hurts himself–or worse.
“Little and Lion is beautifully insightful, honest, and compassionate. Brandy’s ability to find larger meaning in small moments is nothing short of dazzling.” — Nicola Yoon, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Everything, Everything
“A glorious fantasy.” —Neil Gaiman
One of Rolling Stone’s 40 Best YA Novels
A 2014 ALA Rainbow List Top 10 Title
A Booklist Top 10 First Novels for Youth 2013
A Chicago Public Library “Best of the Best” 2013
This Forbidden Romance Could Cost Them Their Lives
Seventeen-year-old Sahar has been in love with her best friend, Nasrin, since they were six. They’ve shared stolen kisses and romantic promises. But Iran is a dangerous place for two girls in love–Sahar and Nasrin could be beaten, imprisoned, even executed. So they carry on in secret until Nasrin’s parents suddenly announce that they’ve arranged for her marriage. Then Sahar discovers what seems like the perfect solution: homosexuality may be a crime, but to be a man trapped in a woman’s body is seen as nature’s mistake, and sex reassignment is legal and accessible. Sahar will never be able to love Nasrin in the body she wants to be loved in without risking their lives, but is saving their love worth sacrificing her true self?
As seen on Netflix with David Letterman
“I come from a country that was created at midnight. When I almost died it was just after midday.”
When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.
On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive.
Instead, Malala’s miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she became a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize.
I AM MALALA is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls’ education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.
I AM MALALA will make you believe in the power of one person’s voice to inspire change in the world.
This beloved debut novel from New York Times bestselling author Julia Alvarez gives voice to four sisters growing up between two cultures when their family is forced to flee the Dominican Republic to New York City due to their father’s involvement in an attempt to overthrow a brutal dictator.
The Garcías—Dr. Carlos (Papi), his wife Laura (Mami), and their four daughters, Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—belong to the uppermost echelon of Spanish Caribbean society, descended from the conquistadores. Their family compound adjoins the palacio of the dictator’s daughter. So when Dr. García’s part in a coup attempt is discovered, the family must flee.
They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Dominican Republic. Papi has to find new patients in the Bronx. Mami, far from the compound and the family retainers, must find herself. Meanwhile, the girls try to lose themselves—by forgetting their Spanish, by straightening their hair and wearing fringed bell bottoms. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating being caught between the old world and the new, trying to live up to their father’s version of honor while accommodating the expectations of their American boyfriends.
Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez’s brilliant and buoyant first novel sets the García girls free to tell their most intimate stories about how they came to be at home—and not at home—in America.
The sensual and enchanting coming-of-age classic from the godfather of Chicano literature follows a young boy growing up in the llano (plains) of post-World War II New Mexico, and the generous curandera who introduces him to the sacred side of life.
“The best-known and most-respected contemporary Chicano fiction.” ―The New York Times
“I pulled this baby into the light of life … Only I will know his destiny.”
Antonio Marez is six years old when the woman who helped usher him into the world comes to stay with his family in New Mexico. Venerated by some as a miracle-worker—and disparaged by others as a bruja—Ultima, a curandera, or healer, opens Tony’s eyes to the spiritual roots of his culture, and introduces him to a magical, if sometimes frightening, new world: a realm in which she operates as a shaman.
Suddenly, the ordinary challenges and triumphs of childhood become extraordinary. As Ultima shows Tony how to cure ailments, reverse curses, and restore peace to those who have lost it, he embarks on a singular quest, one in which he probes the family ties that bind and rend him, questions the Catholicism that shaped him, and explores the Spanish, Mexican, and Native American influences that informed not only his heritage, but his very sense of self. And at each life turn there is Ultima, who was there the day he was born … and will nurture the birth of his soul.
A rich and wondrous story that reveals universal truths about the human condition and celebrates the beauty of Chicano culture.
With a new foreword by author, playwright, and stage director Denise Chavez; a new afterword by award-winning journalist and author Carmela Padilla; and a new essay by Manuel Muñoz, a Macarthur Fellow and winner of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize.
“This extraordinary storyteller has always written unpretentiously but provocatively about identity. Every work is a fiesta, a ceremony preserving but reshaping old traditions that honor the power within the land and la raza, the people.” ―Los Angeles Times Book Review
A PBS Great American Read • Winner of the Premio Quinto Sol Award • Recipient of the National Humanities Medal
Includes a Reading Group Guide.
The groundbreaking guide to trans history in America, revised and updated for a new political era.
Transgender History is the modern classic on transgender life in America since the nineteenth century, encompassing the major movements, writings, and events that shape today’s gender revolution.
Susan Stryker’s sweeping, intersectional account charts more than a century of history, showing how rising acceptance in the 1960s and 2010s was met with waves of bigotry and intolerance that began in the ’70s and continue today.
Through her explanation of central concepts and terms, informative sidebars, and brief biographies of trans pioneers, Stryker reminds readers of one crucial truth: Transgender people have always been here. In good times and bad, they’ve built supportive and expansive communities, battled for freedom, and transformed American culture and society in the process.
Now completely revised and updated, including a longer, global history and a timely chronicle of the latest wave of anti-trans backlash, Transgender History remains both a vital resource and a powerful testament to the enduring legacy of trans lives.
From a celebrated, award-winning author, a modern classic about a young girl fighting for survival in a post-apocalyptic world, perfect for fans of N.K. Jemisin and Margaret Atwood.
Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding social chaos and anarchy caused by climate change and economic crisis. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy—a debilitating sensitivity to others’ emotions.
Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.
Includes a foreword by LeVar Burton and an afterword by N. K. Jemisin
Lauren’s story continues in The Parable of the Talents.
“In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable’ books may be unmatched.”—The New Yorker
A National Book Award winner
The New York Times bestselling history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society.
“An engrossing and relentless intellectual history of prejudice in America.” –Washington Post
Some Americans insist that we’re living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America—it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched racist policies and the nation’s racial inequities.
In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking and, in the process, gives us reason to hope.
When Lilith lyapo wakes from a centuries-long sleep, she finds herself aboard the vast spaceship of the Oankali. She discovers that the Oankali—a seemingly benevolent alien race—intervened in the fate of the humanity hundreds of years ago, saving everyone who survived a nuclear war from a dying, ruined Earth and then putting them into a deep sleep. After learning all they could about Earth and its beings, the Oankali healed the planet, cured cancer, increased human strength, and they now want Lilith to lead her people back to Earth—but salvation comes at a price.
Hopeful and thought-provoking, this post-apocalyptic narrative deftly explores gender and race through the eyes of characters struggling to adapt during a pivotal time of crisis and change.