The books featured during Banned Books Week have all been targeted for removal or restriction in libraries and schools. Challenges to library materials occurred at an unprecedented rate in 2024, and children’s and YA books pertaining to race, gender, and sexual identity remained the titles most targeted by censorship efforts.
Source: The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom
The Bluest Eye (1970) is the first novel written by Toni Morrison. It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove—a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Summary: Maia Kobabe (who uses e/em/eir pronouns) writes this moving autobiography of finding eirself. Covering everything from crushes, how to come out to family and the world at large, and explaining what it means to be non-binary and asexual. A wonderful memoir on what it means to find and live as your most authentic self.
High school freshman Charlie writes a series of letters, to whom we don't know. In them he details his life as a wallflower, struggling to fit in, finding comfort in an odd new circle of friends.
