Number of challenges: 106
Challenged for: LGBTQIA+ content, claimed to be sexually explicit

Maia Kobabe: 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. Now, Gender Queer is here. 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 gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears… (Non-Fiction, Young Adult) 

Number of challenges: 82
Challenged for: LGBTQIA+ content, claimed to be sexually explicit

George M. Johnson: In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys. (Non-Fiction, Young Adult) 

Number of challenges: 71
Challenged for: LGBTQIA+ content, sex education, claimed to be sexually explicit

Juno Dawson: Lesbian. Bisexual. Queer. Transgender. Straight. Curious. This book is for everyone, regardless of gender or sexual preference. This book is for anyone who’s ever dared to wonder. This book is for YOU. There’s a long-running joke that, after “coming out,” a lesbian, gay guy, bisexual, or trans person should receive a membership card and instruction manual. THIS IS THAT INSTRUCTION MANUAL. You’re welcome. Inside you’ll find the answers to all the questions you ever wanted to ask: from sex to politics, hooking up to stereotypes, coming out and more. This candid and uncensored exploration of sexuality and what it’s like to grow up LGBT also includes real stories from people across the gender and sexual spectrums, not to mention illustrations. “Originally published in 2014 in the United Kingdom by Hot Key Books”–Title page verso. (Non-Fiction, Young Adult) 

Number of challenges: 68
Challenged for: claimed to be sexually explicit, LGBTQIA+ content, rape, drugs, profanity

Stephen Chbosky: A coming of age novel about Charlie, a freshman in high school who is a wallflower, shy and introspective, and very intelligent. He deals with the usual teen problems, but also with the suicide of his best friend. (Fiction, Young Adult) 

Number of challenges: 67
Challenged for: LGBTQIA+ content, claimed to be sexually explicit

Mike Curato: “It’s the summer between middle school and high school, and Aiden Navarro is away at camp. Everyone’s going through changes–but for Aiden, the stakes feel higher. As he navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and spends time with Elias (a boy he can’t stop thinking about), he finds himself on a path of self-discovery and acceptance.” (Fiction, Young Adult) 

Number of challenges: 62
Challenged for: rape, incest, claimed to be sexually explicit, EDI content

Toni Morrison: Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison’s haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town’s prosperous black families, as well as its white families, Pecola lives with her alcoholic father and embittered, overworked mother in a shabby two-room storefront that reeks of the hopeless destitution that overwhelms their lives. In awe of her clean well-groomed schoolmates, and certain of her own intense ugliness, Pecola tries to make herself disappear as she wishes fervently, desperately for the blue eyes of a white girl. In her afterward to this novel, Morrison writes of the little girl she once knew: “Beauty was not simply something to behold, it was something one could do. The Bluest Eye was my effort to say something about that; to say something about why she had not, or possibly never would have, the experience of what she possessed and also why she prayed for so radical an alteration. Implicit in her desire was racial self-loathing. And twenty-years later I was still wondering about how one learns that. Who told her? Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak that what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale? The novel pecks away at the gaze that condemned her. (Fiction, Adult) 

Number of challenges: 56
Challenged for: claimed to be sexually explicit, profanity

Jesse Andrews: Greg Gaines is the last master of high school espionage, able to disappear at will into any social environment. He has only one friend, Earl, and together they spend their time making movies, their own incomprehensible versions of Coppola and Herzog cult classics. Until Greg’s mother forces him to rekindle his childhood friendship with Rachel. Rachel has been diagnosed with leukemia — cue extreme adolescent awkwardness — but a parental mandate has been issued and must be obeyed…. (Fiction, Young Adult) 

Number of challenges: 56
Challenged for: claimed to be sexually explicit, drugs, rape, LGBTQIA+ content

Ellen Hopkins: Tricks is a young adult verse novel by Ellen Hopkins, released in August 2009. It tells the converging narratives of five troubled teenage protagonists. (Fiction, Young Adult) 

Number of challenges: 55
Challenged for: claimed to be sexually explicit, sex education, LGBTQIA+ content

Erika Moen, Matthew Nolan: How do you find the answers to all the questions you have about yourself, about your identity, and about your body? Let’s Talk About It provides a comprehensive, thoughtful, well-researched graphic novel guide to everything you need to know but might not know how to talk about. Covering relationships, friendships, gender, sexuality, anatomy, body image, safe sex, sexting, jealousy, rejection, sex education, and more, this is the go-to handbook for every teen navigating adolescence, and the first in graphic novel form. (Non-Fiction, Young Adult) 

Number of challenges: 53
Challenged for: claimed to be sexually explicit, rape

Patricia McCormick: Thirteen-year-old Lakshmi leaves her poor mountain home in Nepal thinking that she is to work in the city as a maid only to find that she has been SoldPM into the sex slave trade in India and that there is no hope of escape. Teenage girls — India — Juvenile fiction. Families — Juvenile fiction. Friendship — Juvenile fiction.(Fiction, Young Adult) 

Top 10 most challenged books of 2022
Challenged for: LGBTQIA+ content, claimed to be sexually explicit

John Green: 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. (Fiction, Young Adult) 

Top 10 most challenged books of 2022
Challenged for: LGBTQIA+ content, claimed to be sexually explicit

Jonathan Evison: “Mike Munoz is a young Mexican American not too many years out of high school–and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew. Though he tries time and again to get his foot on the first rung of that ladder to success, he can’t seem to get a break. But then things start to change for Mike, and after a raucous, jarring, and challenging trip, he finds he can finally see the future and his place in it” (Fiction, Adult)