It’s Banned Books Week, "an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. Typically held during the last week of September, it highlights the value of free and open access to information. Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community; librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types, in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.”

This year, the focus of Banned Books Week is on celebrating diverse books. Olusina Adebayo of the Association of American Publishers explains, "The majority of banned books are disproportionally from diverse authors. The 2016 celebration of Banned Books Week (taking place Sept. 25 - Oct. 1) will examine this dichotomy." (See a list of books with diverse content that have been frequently challenged since 1990.) Look for Banned Books Week events in your area.

Based on 275 challenges, here are the top ten most challenged books of 2015.

1. Looking for Alaska by John Green
   Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited for age group.


2. Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
   Reasons: Sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and other (“poorly written,” “concerns that a group of teenagers will want to try it”).


3. I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings
   Reasons: Inaccurate, homosexuality, sex education, religious viewpoint, and unsuited for age group.


4. Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin
   Reasons: Anti-family, offensive language, homosexuality, sex education, political viewpoint, religious viewpoint, unsuited for age group, and other (“wants to remove from collection to ward off complaints”).


5. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
   Reasons: Offensive language, religious viewpoint, unsuited for age group, and other (“profanity and atheism”).


6. The Holy Bible
   Reasons: Religious viewpoint.


7. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
   Reasons: Violence and other (“graphic images”).


8. Habibi by Craig Thompson
   Reasons: Nudity, sexually explicit, and unsuited for age group.


9. Nasreen’s Secret School: A True Story from Afghanistan by Jeanette Winter
   Reasons: Religious viewpoint, unsuited to age group, and violence.


10. Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan
    Reasons: Homosexuality and other (“condones public displays of affection”).

Here’s how the Horn Book reviewed 2015’s most challenged children’s and young adult books.

Looking for Alaska
by John Green
High School     Dutton     237 pp.
3/05     0-525-47506-0     $15.99      g

A collector of famous last words, teenage Miles Halter uses Rabelais’s final quote (“I go to seek a Great Perhaps”) to  explain why he’s chosen to leave public high school for Culver Creek Preparatory School in rural Alabama. In his case, the Great Perhaps includes challenging classes, a hard-drinking roommate, elaborate school-wide pranks, and Alaska Young, the enigmatic girl rooming five doors down. Moody, sexy, and even a bit mean, Alaska draws Miles into her schemes,  defends him when there’s trouble, and never stops flirting with the clearly love-struck narrator. A drunken make-out session ends with Alaska’s whispered “To be continued?” but within hours she’s killed in a car accident. In the following weeks, Miles and his friends investigate Alaska’s crash, question the possibility that it could have been suicide, and  acknowledge their own survivor guilt. The narrative concludes with an essay Miles writes about this event for his religion class — an unusually heavy-handed note in an otherwise mature novel, peopled with intelligent characters who talk smart, yet don’t always behave that way, and are thus notably complex and realistically portrayed teenagers. PETER D. SIERUTA
reviewed in the March/April 2005 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

I Am Jazz
by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings; illus. by Shelagh McNicholas
Preschool, Primary     Dial     24 pp.
8/14     978-0-8037-4107-2     $17.99

A little girl describes how she was born with "a girl brain but a boy body" and that once her parents talked to a doctor to understand more about it, they let her be herself. There is little plot, but the straightforward text and friendly, pastel-hued watercolors fairly successfully simplify the issue of gender identity for a young audience and their caregivers. MAEVE VISSER KNOTH
reviewed in the Spring 2015 issue of The Horn Book Guide

Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out
by Susan Kuklin
High School    Candlewick    182 pp.
2/14    978-0-7636-5611-9    $22.99
e-book ed.  978-0-7636-7035-1    $22.99

Rather than attempting to convey the spectrum of transgender experience through a multitude of voices, Kuklin tries something different here, focusing on just six young people whose gender identity is something other than what it was labeled at birth. All six take gender-altering hormones; four were birth-designated male and two female, but in all cases there is no confusion about who they are now. Christina, born Matthew, looks forward to a complete transition (“It would be so great if I could get an operation, if I could get my vagina”), while Cameron says, “I like to be recognized as not a boy and not a girl. I’m gender queer, gender fluid, and gender other.” In her edited transcriptions of the interviews, Kuklin lets her subjects speak wholly for themselves, and while their bravery is heartening, their bravado can be heartbreaking. But who expects teenagers to be tentative? Photographs (of most of the subjects) are candid and winning; and appended material, including Kuklin’s explanation of her interview process, a Q&A with the director of a clinic for transgendered teens, and a great resource list, is valuable. ROGER SUTTON
reviewed in the March/April 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

Nasreen’s Secret School: A True Story from Afghanistan
by Jeanette Winter; illus. by the author
Primary     Beach Lane/Simon      40 pp.
10/09     978-1-4169-9437-4     $16.99

An author’s note at the beginning provides background, contrasting the way women were allowed to live before and after the Taliban ascended in Afghanistan; Winter explains that her main character, Nasreen, is real, but her name has been changed. With explanations out of the way, Winter is able to keep her text elegantly and eloquently spare. The story is narrated by Nasreen’s grandmother, who recounts how, after Nasreen’s father was taken away by soldiers and her mother disappeared, the little girl “never spoke a word. She never smiled. She just sat, waiting for her mama and papa to return.” Finally, the worried grandmother takes her granddaughter to a secret school for girls, where for months she remains silent until another little girl whispers (after the long winter break), “I missed you.” Winter keeps to her characteristic art style, with each acrylic painting neatly enclosed in a frame, and uses many patterns and colors representative of Afghani fabrics. Dark clouds provide a recurring motif throughout, in the sky or echoed below on the pavement, until at the end, as Nasreen finally opens up again, the clouds turn pink and there are glimpses of blue sky. As in The Librarian of Basra (rev. 1/05), Winter celebrates the importance of education (“the soldiers can never close the windows that have opened for my  granddaughter”), and the reminder to Western children that it is a privilege worth fighting for is a powerful one. SUSAN DOVE LEMPKE
reviewed in the September/October 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Two Boys Kissing
by David Levithan
Middle School, High School     Knopf     201 pp.
8/13     978-0-307-93190-0     $16.99

Craig and Harry attempt to break the world record for longest kiss, which, in turn, affects the lives of the people around them. Narrated by a ghostly chorus of past generations of gay men who died of AIDS, Levithan's latest novel weaves together an informed (sometimes melodramatic) perspective on the past with the present-day stories of seven boys constructing their own sexual identities. SHARA L. HARDESON
reviewed in the Spring 2014 issue of The Horn Book Guide

Which banned books are you reading this week?