4,235 Books Were Challenged in 2025 and Less Than 3 Percent of the Complaints Came From Parents

The American Library Association published its State of America’s Libraries 2026 report on April 20, and the headline number is the one everyone is repeating: 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, the second-highest figure ever recorded, just five books shy of the 2023 peak. That is the number you will see in every wire story.

The number you will not see in most headlines is buried two paragraphs into the ALA press release. Less than 3 percent of those challenges came from individual parents. Ninety-two percent came from organized pressure groups, elected officials, and library board members. In 2024, that figure was 72 percent. In one year, the share of organized political challenges jumped twenty points.

So the next time someone tells you a book is being pulled because of “concerned parents,” you are allowed to ask which parents, and how many, and whether they have ever set foot in the library in question. The math says the answer is almost always nobody, none, and no.

Sarah J. Maas Is Now a Two-Time Banned Author

The 2025 list has eleven entries thanks to a four-way tie at number eight. Patricia McCormick’s Sold took the top spot. Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower is at number two, which means in the year of our lord 2026 we are still arguing about a 1999 novel about a sad teenager. Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer sits at number three, where it has lived for years.

The genuinely new entry, and the funny one if you squint, is Sarah J. Maas. Empire of Storms landed at number four. A Court of Thorns and Roses landed at number seven. Maas is the most-followed author on BookTok, the engine behind a billion-dollar romantasy boom, and apparently also the woman who, in the eyes of certain school boards, must be stopped at all costs. The same novels that fuel midnight release parties at Barnes and Noble are getting yanked off middle school shelves three states over.

Romantasy is the most commercially successful publishing trend of the decade, and the math behind it explains the friction. We dug into how BookTok rewrote the rules of what publishing can actually sell, and the answer is: thick, spicy, often genre-blurring fantasy aimed at adult women. The category is too big to ignore, too profitable for publishers to walk away from, and apparently too horny for several state legislatures. All three of those things can be true at the same time.

A Clockwork Orange, Still, Somehow

Tied at eighth place: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. The novel was published in 1962. The Stanley Kubrick film is older than most of the people complaining about the book. Every English department in the country has been arguing about whether the chapter 21 ending is the right one for sixty years. And in 2025 it was challenged enough times to crack the top ten.

You could read this as a sign that the canon is finally being interrogated. You could also read it as evidence that whoever is filing these challenges is not actually reading the books. A Clockwork Orange is not a beach read sneaking onto a YA shelf. It is a hard, intentionally ugly novel about state violence and free will. Pulling it from a high school library is not protecting anyone, it is just confessing you have not opened the book since the cover scared you in the bookstore.

The same logic applies to John Green’s Looking for Alaska, which has been on this list for so long it has practically earned tenure. Green has been writing open letters to school boards since the Obama administration. The challenges keep coming because the goal is not to engage with the book, it is to remove the book.

Who Is Actually Filing the Paperwork

Here is where the report stops being depressing and starts being useful. The ALA broke down the source of the 713 documented censorship attempts:

• 40 percent came from board members and library administrators
• 31 percent came from elected government officials
• Less than 3 percent came from individual parents
• About 1.4 percent came from individual library users

Sarah Lamdan, executive director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, called the trend “a well-funded, politically-driven campaign to suppress the stories of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals.” That is not librarian hyperbole, it is what the data shows. Roughly 40 percent of challenged titles in 2025 represented the lived experience of LGBTQ people or people of color, which works out to 1,671 books targeted on identity grounds.

The “parents” framing has done a lot of work for these campaigns over the past three years because it sounds local, organic, and reasonable. Reasonable people listen to other reasonable people. The data says it is not local, it is not organic, and the people sending the forms are mostly not parents at all. They are organized advocacy groups working a template against thousands of districts at once.

What This Means for Anyone Who Reads

Two things you can actually do with this information.

First: the publishing industry has noticed. We wrote about how independent bookstores have grown 70 percent since 2020, and a chunk of that growth is exactly this. When a chain pulls a title under pressure, the indie down the street stocks it on a face-out display. Banned book displays are now a measurable retail strategy. Buying from those stores is the only feedback loop the industry actually responds to.

Second: the National Library Week numbers are the floor, not the ceiling. The ALA only counts what gets reported. Quiet weedings, soft pulls, “we are reorganizing the YA section” reshufflings, none of those show up in the 4,235 figure. Librarians have been telling reporters for two years that the documented number is maybe half of what is actually happening.

None of this is going to surprise anyone who has watched the trajectory since 2021. What is surprising is how far the gap between the framing and the reality has stretched. We are not talking about parents anymore. We have not been talking about parents for a while. The 2026 ALA report is the first one that just states the math out loud and lets the reader decide whether the framing was ever honest.

It also means the most challenged book in America right now is a novel about child trafficking written by a woman who has spent her career interviewing trafficked children. Not because anyone read it. Because someone, somewhere, ran her name through a list.

If you want a different reading list for the rest of April, we have been collecting suggestions, including why a major author hid behind a pseudonym to expose her own industry. The point of a public library is that nobody gets to pick what you read. The point of buying books is that nobody gets to take them off your shelf.