ALA Releases 2025 Most-Challenged Books List as Share of Challenges From Pressure Groups Jumps From 72% to 92%
The American Library Association documented 4,235 unique titles challenged at U.S. libraries in 2025 — the second-highest year on record — and reports that the share of challenges initiated by organized pressure groups, government officials, or local decision-makers rose from 72% in 2024 to 92% in 2025.
The American Library Association on Sunday released its 2025 Top Eleven Most Challenged Books list (the count expanded by ties) and the underlying State of America's Libraries Report 2026, the annual census of attempts to remove or restrict access to books in U.S. public and school libraries. Patricia McCormick's Sold — a 2006 novel about a Nepali girl trafficked into Indian sex slavery — led the list with 36 documented challenges in 2025, followed by Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (33) and Maia Kobabe's graphic memoir Gender Queer (25).
The list
| # | Title | Author | Challenges |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sold | Patricia McCormick | 36 |
| 2 | The Perks of Being a Wallflower | Stephen Chbosky | 33 |
| 3 | Gender Queer: A Memoir | Maia Kobabe | 25 |
| 4 | Empire of Storms | Sarah J. Maas | 24 |
| 5 | Last Night at the Telegraph Club | Malinda Lo | 23 |
| 5 |
The Office for Intellectual Freedom, which compiles the list from voluntary library reports and public records, notes that its tally captures only documented challenges and almost certainly understates the true total because most challenges go unreported.
What the broader report shows
The headline number for 2025: the ALA documented 4,235 unique titles challenged at U.S. libraries — the second-highest year in the four-decade history of the count, surpassed only by 2023. Those titles were targeted in 713 separate censorship attempts, with 487 of those attempts directed at books rather than displays, programs, or services. The total number of book removals across the 4,235 titles was 5,668, meaning about two-thirds of challenged titles were removed in at least one location.
The most consequential change in 2025 is who initiates the challenges. According to the ALA, 92% of book challenges in 2025 came from organized pressure groups, government officials, board members, administrators, or other local decision-makers — up from 72% in 2024. That is a 20-point year-over-year jump. The corollary: challenges from individual parents — historically the dominant category — fell to roughly 8% of the total. The ALA frames this as a structural shift from individual parental concerns to coordinated, top-down censorship campaigns.
Approximately 40% of all challenged titles in 2025 — 1,671 books — featured representations of LGBTQ+ people or people of color. The most-cited justifications in the public record were claims of "obscenity" or unsuitability for minors, LGBTQIA+ content, and books addressing race, racism, equity, or social justice.
The list as census, not editorial
The Top Ten/Eleven list is built from challenges the ALA can verify against a documentary trail (board minutes, complaint forms, public meetings, news reports). The same book can appear on the list in multiple consecutive years — Gender Queer has now ranked among the most-challenged books every year since 2021. A Clockwork Orange and Looking for Alaska are both library-system fixtures of decades' standing; their inclusion this year reflects state-level removal lists adopted in several states rather than fresh editorial controversies. Ellen Hopkins, Sarah J. Maas, and Jennifer L. Armentrout — three authors whose young-adult and adult fantasy work appears multiple times on the list — have collectively had eight titles challenged in 2025, the highest concentration of any single-author cluster on the report.
The ALA released the list on April 20, 2026, the opening of National Library Week, alongside the full State of America's Libraries Report 2026.