ALA Reports 4,235 Unique Books Challenged in 2025, Second-Highest Total on Record

The book tells the story of a 17-year-old Chinese-American girl discovering her identity as a lesbian in the 1950s.

“Sexuality is part of her story and leaving it out would be dishonest. I feel that art has a duty to tell the truth so I did so in this novel and I believe that the people who want to ban it are not necessarily reacting to the sexuality directly so much as they are trying to prevent young people from having the opportunity to see that possibilities exist in the world,” Lo said.

” Lo added that the trend alarms her given her own history.

“America is not China at this point but there have been so many attacks on the first amendment, including book bans, over the past several years it’s quite disturbing to me. I find it extremely alarming and I find it alarming that more people do not find it alarming. I fear that we are well on our way to authoritarianism,” she said.

Last month Luanne James, the top librarian in Rutherford County, Tennessee, was fired for refusing to move more than 130 books with LGBTQ+ themes to the system’s adult section. Sam Helmick, president of the ALA, said libraries were already feeling the grind but now to have them vilified has been incredibly demoralising. “Nobody wants to be attacked for serving the public; nobody deserves to be.

But the second is we know what’s at stake. This is a culture war but it’s also distracting us from a class war and if libraries fall in the United States, there’s a lot of social infrastructure that will collapse with it,” Helmick said. Kasey Meehan, the director of the Freedom to Read programme at PEN America, described how local tactics have scaled.

“We’ve seen the way in which those tactics have been adopted by governors and state legislatures and then adopted in language that is signed as state legislation. There’s several examples where some of these groups have stood side by side with elected leaders as they’ve proposed bills that would effectively censor certain kinds of books for kids in schools,” Meehan said.

” More than 5,000 writers have formed Authors Against Book Bans.

The group successfully passed legislation to protect libraries in Colorado, Oregon, and Rhode Island. The Guardian reported that literature featuring LGBTQ+ themes and people of colour remain the primary targets amid the coordinated campaigns.