Top 13 Most Challenged Books of 2022
The American Library Association tracked 1,269 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2022. Of the 2,571 unique titles that were challenged or banned in 2022, here are the top 13 most challenged.
#1 Gender Queer: A Memoir
by Maia Kobabe (e/em/eir)
LOCAL AUTHOR. In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Then e created Gender Queer. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gayfan fiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: It is a useful and touching guide on gender identity--what it means and how to think about it--for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.
YG 306.76 KOBABE
by George M. Johnson (they/them)
A first book by the prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist shares personal essays that chronicle their childhood, adolescence and college years as a Black queer youth, exploring subjects ranging from gender identity and toxic masculinity to structural marginalization and Black joy.
Y 306.7662 JOHNSON
by Toni Morrison (she/her)
The first novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author relates the story of Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old Black girl growing up in an America that values blue-eyed blondes, and the tragedy that results because of her longing to be accepted.
MORRISON
by Mike Curato (he/him)
In the summer between middle school and high school, Aiden Navarro navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and finds himself drawn to Elias, a boy he can't stop thinking about.
YG CURATO
by John Green (he/him)
Sixteen-year-old Miles' first year at Culver Creek Preparatory School in Alabama includes good friends and great pranks, but is defined by the search for answers about life and death after a fatal car crash.
Y GREEN
#5 (tie)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
by Stephen Chbosky (he/him)
This haunting novel about the dilemma of passivity vs. passion marks the stunning debut of a provocative voice in contemporary fiction. This is the story of what it's like to grow up in high school. More intimate than a diary, Charlie's letters are singular, hilarious, and devastating.
Y CHBOSKY
by Jonathan Evison (he/him)
Faced by a life of menial prospects in the years after high school, Mike Muñoz, a young Mexican-American, attempts over and over to change his life for the better and achieve the American dream only to be stymied by social class distinctions and cultural discrimination.
EVISON/Y EVISON
#8
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Mike Curato (he/him)
Traces the story of a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation who leaves his troubled school to pursue an education in an all-white farm town where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
Y ALEXIE
by Ashley Hope Pérez (she/her)
Loosely based on a school explosion that took place in Texas in 1937, tells the story of two teenagers--Naomi, who is Mexican, and Wash, who is black--and their dealings with race, segregation, love, and the forces that destroy people.
Y PEREZ
#10 (tie)
A Court of Mist and Fury
by Sarah J. Maas (she/her)
Retaining her human heart despite her latent High Fae powers, Feyre struggles with guilt over the deeds she performed to save Tamlin's people while navigating the Night Court's web of politics, passion and evil.
Y MAAS
by Ellen Hopkins (she/her)
Kristina Snow is the perfect daughter, but she meets a boy who introduces her to drugs and becomes a very different person, struggling to control her life and her mind.
Y HOPKINS
#10 (tie)
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
by Jesse Andrews (he/him)
Greg has managed to become part of every social group at his Pittsburgh high school without having any friends, but his life changes when his mother forces him to befriendRachel, a girl he once knew in Hebrew school who has leukemia.
Y ANDREWS
by Juno Dawson (she/her)
A British author of teen fiction offers basic information about the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender experience, including terms, religious issues, coming out, and sex acts, for people of all orientations, including the merely curious.
Y 306.766 DAWSON
