The list of challenged books in American schools and libraries is short, repetitive, and heavily weighted toward titles dealing with sexuality, LGBTQ+ identity, and racial trauma. The American Library Association publishes an annual ranking of the most-challenged books based on formal complaints reported to its Office for Intellectual Freedom, and the same handful of titles appear year after year.
The Most Challenged Books of 2024
ALA’s top ten most challenged books of 2024, in order:
- All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson
- Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
- The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (tied for third)
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (tied for third)
- Tricks by Ellen Hopkins
- Crank by Ellen Hopkins
- Looking for Alaska by John Green
- Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews
- Sold by Patricia McCormick
- Flamer by Mike Curato
Johnson’s memoir topped the list, followed by Kobabe’s graphic memoir. Morrison’s novel and Chbosky’s coming-of-age story tied for third.1American Library Association. Challenge Reporting
Why These Books Get Challenged
Formal objections almost always cite one or more of the same concerns. Sexual content, whether described in prose or shown in graphic-novel illustrations, is the single most common trigger. LGBTQ+ themes and characters draw a large share of complaints, with challengers arguing that such content is inappropriate for minors. Profanity, graphic violence, drug use, and depictions of racism or historical trauma round out the usual grounds.
Each title in the current top ten fits one or more of those categories. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue and Kobabe’s Gender Queer center on LGBTQ+ identity and include descriptions or images of sexual experience. Curato’s Flamer follows a queer teenager at summer camp. Hopkins’s Crank and Tricks deal with addiction and sexual exploitation. Green’s Looking for Alaska and Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower contain sexual scenes involving teenagers. Andrews’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl uses crude language throughout. McCormick’s Sold depicts child sex trafficking. Morrison’s The Bluest Eye contains scenes of sexual violence tied to its exploration of race in America.
Sexual content is the most-cited concern, but it is worth understanding what a library has already done before a book reaches its shelf. Librarians rely on reviews in professional journals and formal collection development policies that weigh literary quality, relevance to the community, and educational value. A challenge is not a complaint about an oversight. It is a request to override a selection process that already applied professional standards.
Why the Same Books Keep Appearing
Classic literature has never been immune. The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, has appeared on most-challenged lists for years. The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Looking for Alaska are also familiar names. The steady presence of the same titles across multiple years suggests that challenges are often driven by organized campaigns rather than one-off individual complaints. A single district policy can produce hundreds of removals at once, and a single challenge form can name dozens of titles pulled from lists circulating on social media.
How a Book Gets on a Challenge List
A book lands on the ALA’s tracking list when someone files a formal Request for Reconsideration with a school or public library. The form asks the challenger to identify specific passages they find objectionable and to state what outcome they want: moving the book to a restricted section, adding a parental advisory, or removing it altogether. Most policies require the challenger to confirm they have read the entire work, not only the excerpts circulating online. That requirement matters because courts have consistently held that judging a book from isolated passages, rather than as a whole, is legally insufficient.
The institution then convenes a review committee, usually a mix of librarians, teachers, administrators, and sometimes parents. The committee reads the full text, weighs it against the collection development policy, and recommends whether to retain, relocate, or remove. The final decision rests with the school board or library board of trustees in a public vote. In most jurisdictions, the challenge forms, committee deliberations, and board correspondence are subject to public records requests, so anyone can inspect how a decision was made.
Challenged vs. Banned: How to Read the Numbers
A challenge is a formal written request to restrict or remove a title. A ban is the actual removal that sometimes follows. The two figures are very different, and they come from different trackers.
The American Library Association counts formal challenge attempts reported to its Office for Intellectual Freedom. In the first eight months of 2024, ALA logged 414 challenge attempts targeting 1,128 unique titles. Those numbers were down from the same period in 2023 but still far above pre-2020 levels.2American Library Association. American Library Association Reveals Preliminary Data on 2024 Book Challenges
PEN America tracks confirmed removals from public school shelves. For the 2024–25 school year, PEN recorded 6,870 book bans across 23 states and 87 public school districts, affecting works by nearly 2,600 authors, illustrators, and translators. Across the four years since 2021, PEN has documented nearly 23,000 instances of books removed from public school shelves.3PEN America. Book Bans
Both datasets are useful. A single challenge can target dozens of titles at once, and a single district-level decision can produce hundreds of removals. Reading the ALA and PEN numbers together shows both how often books are challenged and how often those challenges succeed.
Where to Look Up Challenge Data
The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has tracked challenged materials since 1990, publishing annual top-ten lists and accepting reports from librarians, educators, and community members.1American Library Association. Challenge Reporting PEN America publishes a searchable index of confirmed bans by school district, state, and content theme, covering 2021 forward.3PEN America. Book Bans If you want to know whether a specific title has been challenged in a specific district, those are the two places to start.
Why Most Challenged Books Stay on the Shelf
Appearing on a challenge list does not mean a book is illegal, obscene, or headed for permanent removal. The Supreme Court set the constitutional line for obscenity in Miller v. California (1973). A work qualifies as legally obscene only if all three of the following are true: the average person applying community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to a prurient interest; the work depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way as defined by applicable law; and the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.4Justia Law. Miller v California, 413 US 15
That third prong is where most challenges to well-known books fall apart. A work with genuine literary or artistic merit cannot be legally obscene, no matter how graphic individual passages may be. The Bluest Eye, written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has survived decades of challenges for that reason.
School libraries operate under a second constraint. In Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico (1982), the Supreme Court held that school boards have broad discretion to manage library collections but that discretion “may not be exercised in a narrowly partisan or political manner.” If a board removes a book because it dislikes the ideas the book contains, and that ideological motive is the decisive factor, the removal violates the First Amendment. Students, the Court said, do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”5Justia Law. Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No 26 v Pico, 457 US 853
The practical result: a title on ALA’s most-challenged list has been formally objected to somewhere in the country, sometimes in many places at once. Whether it stays on a given library’s shelf depends on that library’s review process, the board’s reasoning, and, if anyone sues, how a court applies Miller and Pico to the record.