9 Great Banned Books You Probably Haven’t Read

At the crux of the banned books debate is the issue of what teenage readers can handle. Efforts to censor the topics, themes, and language students encounter in their school's library or reading lists has the potential to significantly hinder their worldview as encountered through literature, and underestimates the level of complexity and nuance young adult readers are capable of exercising when reading.

Not only are they engrossing reads, but some of the most famous banned books—Lois Lowry's The Giver, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and George Orwell's 1984—offer critical insights on identity and society, and often spurring readers to apply a similar level of criticism to their own lives and the systems that rule them.

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock (2013)

Matthew Quick

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock follows a single day in the life of a deeply troubled teenage boy, but its scope reaches far beyond that premise. A strong pick for fans of cult classics like The Catcher in the Rye and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the novel explores isolation, trauma, and mental health through the unflinching first-person perspective of a complex, layered, and vividly realized character.

Leonard Peacock begins the day with a mission: to say goodbye to the people closest to him before killing his best friend and then himself with his grandfather's pistol. Despite the dismal premise, Forgive Me Leonard Peacock is a book about hope.

Banned from Knox County schools in compliance with a 2024 amendment to Tennessee's Age-Appropriate Materials Act, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock confronts some of the darkest realities of adolescence without reducing Leonard to his worst thoughts or impulses, instead asking what can happen when someone in crisis is finally seen, heard, and given a reason to keep going.

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The 57 Bus: A True Story Of Two Teenagers And The Crime That Changed Their Lives (2017)

Dashka Slater

Daskha Slater's gripping narrative nonfiction The 57 Bus tells the story of a violent crime between two teenagers, examining the systemic and personal factors that led to the crime and the aftermath. It offers a fascinating and nuanced examination of race, class, gender, and the justice system, expertly told at a relentless pace.

The 57 Bus was banned from Knox County schools in Tennessee in December 2024, citing the discussion of LGBTQ+ topics as reason for removal. The 57 Bus offers an accessible introduction to themes of systemic oppression, identity, and restorative justice while resisting easy answers about guilt, punishment, and forgiveness.

By giving equal weight to both teenagers at the center of the story, Slater turns a headline-ready crime into a far more complicated portrait of the people and institutions surrounding it.

Fun Home (2006)

Alison Bechdel

Fun Home, the 2006 graphic memoir by cartoonist Alison Bechdel (also known for the Bechdel Test, a popular metric used to measure female representation in fiction), tells a story of intergenerational patterns and memory. Bechdel tracks her life growing up in a funeral home, her family's mortuary business, and coming into her own as a lesbian, in an effort to understand her father's suicide.

Fun Home has been banned at multiple school districts across the United States. The book is thematically heavy, encompassing Bechdel's grief, self-discovery, and desire to uncover who her father truly was—and why he made the choices he did. But Bechdel's storytelling is so smart and infused with humor that you just can't help but get sucked in. Fun Home was adapted into a Broadway musical, winning five Tony Awards.

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The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)

Emily M. Danforth

The first thing Cameron Post felt after her parents suddenly died in a car accident was relief. She's grateful to know that they will never know that she had been kissing a girl hours before they died. It's only when her aunt and grandmother send her away to a gay conversion camp that she is forced to fully confront her grief.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a coming-of-age story that wears its heart on its sleeve, following a story of self-discovery marred by tragedy but rescued by friendship. The novel was banned from Cape Henlopen High School in Delaware for inappropriate language and profanity in 2014.

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I’ll Give You The Sun (2014)

Jandy Nelson

Jandy Nelson's I'll Give You the Sun follows twins Jude and Noah as they grow apart in the aftermath of grief, jealousy, and family secrets, with the novel alternating between their perspectives at different points in adolescence. Nelson's lyrical, emotionally charged writing turns the story into both a coming-of-age novel and a portrait of how differently two people can experience the same family.

I'll Give You the Sun has been banned in multiple public school districts and counties across several U.S. states, with challengers citing its mature themes, sexual content, and depictions of LGBTQ+ relationships. The novel won the 2015 Michael L. Printz Award, given to a book that exemplifies literary excellence in young adult literature. Its recognition and continued challenges make it a particularly striking example of how frequently acclaimed books for teens can become targets for removal.

The House of the Spirits (1982)

Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits follows the Trueba family across several generations as political upheaval transforms their unnamed Latin American country. Blending magical realism with historical and political fiction, the novel begins with the otherworldly Clara del Valle before expanding into a sprawling family saga shaped by love, violence, class, and revolution.

The House of the Spirits has faced challenges in schools for its depictions of sexuality and violence, as well as its political and religious themes. But those difficult subjects are inseparable from what makes Allende's novel so powerful. Beneath its supernatural elements is a story about how political violence reverberates through families and generations—and how remembering the past can itself become an act of resistance.

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Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is simultaneously a war novel, a work of science fiction, and one of the strangest time-travel stories ever written. The novel follows Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier who becomes "unstuck in time," bouncing uncontrollably between moments in his life, including his experience of the firebombing of Dresden and his eventual abduction by aliens called Tralfamadorians.

Since its 1969 publication, Slaughterhouse-Five has repeatedly faced challenges and removals from schools over its profanity, sexual content, violence, and irreverent treatment of religion. Yet its fragmented structure is also what makes Vonnegut's anti-war novel so enduring. Billy can travel through time, but he can never actually change what happened to him, turning an absurd science-fiction premise into a devastating depiction of trauma, memory, and the impossibility of escaping the past.

Parable of the Sower (1993)

Octavia E. Butler

Published in 1993 but beginning in the then-future year of 2024, Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower imagines an America devastated by climate change, economic inequality, corporate power, and widespread violence. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina is forced to leave her gated California community and travel north, gradually developing a belief system called Earthseed around one central idea: "God is Change."

Parable of the Sower has faced challenges over its violence, sexual content, and treatment of religion, among other objections. But Butler's willingness to confront those subjects is precisely what gives the novel its staying power. Rather than relying on a distant or fantastical apocalypse, Butler builds her dystopia out of recognizable social problems, making Lauren's journey feel increasingly unsettling decades after the book was written.

The Golden Compass (1996)

Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass opens the His Dark Materials trilogy by introducing Lyra Belacqua, a young girl living in a parallel world where human souls exist outside their bodies as animal companions called dæmons. After children begin mysteriously disappearing, Lyra's search for her missing friend draws her into a much larger conflict involving Dust, parallel universes, and the powerful religious institution known as the Magisterium.

Pullman's fantasy series has faced considerable controversy and challenges because of its criticism of organized religion and its treatment of theological ideas. But reducing The Golden Compass to its controversy overlooks just how inventive the novel is. Pullman uses witches, armored polar bears, dæmons, and alternate worlds to tell a surprisingly complex story about knowledge, authority, free will, and what can happen when institutions attempt to control what people are allowed to understand.