Banned Books
VIRTUAL ESCAPE ROOM
Special Collections
Main Collection
Oh no!
Reading Room
Circulation
Librarians need your help to stop book banning!
Censors are trying to remove important stories from history. Solve puzzles to save the books before they disappear. Enter the first room to help unlock the Research Help Desk, where your librarians fight to give you access to important books and information.
Popular Books
Research Help
Research Help
Research Help
Great work! You helped librarians protect these frequently challenged books!
Next
Special Collections
Main Collection
Oh no!
Reading Room
Popular Books are being targeted for censorship!
Circulation
Some of the most banned books are often for young adults, including titles like The Hunger Games and The Poet X. Enter the Popular Books room to protect these titles and more by uncovering a frequently banned book.
Popular Books
Research Help
Popular Books
1/3
Answer questions to uncover the banned book.
Question 1
Which award-winning graphic novel, that uses racial stereotypes to critique prejudice, has been banned in some schools?
Smile by Raina Telgemeier
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
Popular Books
2/3
Question 2
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has been banned and challenged in some schools for allegedly promoting what?
Witchcraft and the occult
Violence
Political rebellion
Popular Books
3/3
Question 3
Who is the author of A Court of Thorns and Roses, which is often banned and challenged for mature content and perceived negative influence on teens?
Suzanne Collins
Alice Oseman
Sarah J. Maas
Popular Books
3/3
Yes! You unlocked the Popular Books Collection!
Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give has been one of the most frequently challenged books in the U.S. since its 2017 release. It’s often banned or removed from libraries because it contains strong language and themes of racism, police brutality, and protests against systemic injustice.
Next
Special Collections
Main Collection
Oh no!
Reading Room
Circulation
Books in the Reading Room are being redacted!
In 2024, more than 2,400 books were targeted for censorship in schools and libraries. Enter the Reading Room to uncover a censored passage from a frequently challenged book.
Popular Books
Research Help
Reading Room
Fill in the blanks to prevent this book from censorship.
Reading Room
Great work! You stopped the censorship of Fahrenheit 451, a 1953 dystopian novel that portrays a fictional American society where books have been outlawed and burned.
“Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.”
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Next
Special Collections
Main Collection
Oh no!
Reading Room
The Main Collection is under attack for its content!
Circulation
Some of the most common reasons books are banned are because of themes related to race, LGBTQ+ identities, religion, violence, or language. However, these themes help us to understand different perspectives and can promote empathy. Enter the Main Collection to solve riddles to free some frequently challenged books.
Popular Books
Research Help
Main Collection
I tell of love, loss, and pain. A search for meaning, not in vain.
Teens and tragedy fill my pages. But some say I’m “too raw” for certain ages.What book am I?
Main Collection
Mice and cats tell history’s fight. A family’s past in black and white. Some say it’s “too harsh” to see. Yet it shows truth and memory.What book am I?
Main Collection
In a world where women lose their voice, I’m forced to serve without a choice. My red cloak hides both fear and fight. But some say my story should stay out of sight.What book am I?
Main Collection
Great work! The Main Collection is open and knowledge is protected!
Book banning is harmful because it silences voices, erases important perspectives, limits personal choice, and denies communities the freedom to learn and think for themselves.
Next
Special Collections
Main Collection
Oh no!
Special Collections and Archives holds some of our most historical books at risk of being banned!
Reading Room
Circulation
Popular Books
The first recorded book ban in the United States was in 1637, when a religious pamphlet criticizing the Puritans was suppressed in Massachusetts. Enter Special Collections to find clues to uncover an important phrase.
Research Help
Special Collections
Special Collections
YES! The Special Collections and Archives are safe!
“Freedom to Read” is important because it protects our First Amendment rights, keeps voices and perspectives available, ensures everyone has access to stories, and focuses on the positive power of choice.
Next
Special Collections
Main Collection
Congratulations!
Reading Room
Circulation
You made it to the Circulation Desk to check out your books!
Popular Books
Exit the library to finish. But don't forget to visit the Turlock or Stockton campus library to find many of your favorite banned and challenged books!
Research Help
Click each book to learn more and borrow it from the University Library
Restart
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Crank
By Ellen Hopkins
Ellen Hopkins chronicles the turbulent and often disturbing relationship between Kristina, a character based on her own daughter, and the "monster," the highly addictive drug crystal meth, or "crank." Kristina is introduced to the drug while visiting her largely absent and ne'er-do-well father. While under the influence of the monster, Kristina discovers her sexy alter-ego, Bree: "there is no perfect daughter, / no gifted high school junior, / no Kristina Georgia Snow. / There is only Bree." Bree will do all the things good girl Kristina won't, including attracting the attention of dangerous boys who can provide her with a steady flow of crank.
Check it out!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
By Jesse Andrews
Greg Gaines is the last master of high school espionage, able to disappear at will into any social environment. He has only one friend, Earl, and together they spend their time making movies, their own incomprehensible versions of Coppola and Herzog cult classics. Until Greg’s mother forces him to rekindle his childhood friendship with Rachel. Rachel has been diagnosed with leukemia — cue extreme adolescent awkwardness — but a parental mandate has been issued and must be obeyed….
Check it out!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Sold
By Patricia McCormick
Lakshmi is a thirteen-year-old girl who lives with her family in a small hut on a mountain in Nepal. Though desperately poor, her life is full of simple pleasures, like playing hopscotch with her best friend from school, and having her mother brush her hair by the light of an oil lamp. But when the harsh Himalayan monsoons wash away all that remains of the family's crops, Lakshmi's stepfather says she must leave home and take a job to support her family.
He introduces her to a glamorous stranger who tells her she will find her a job as a maid in the city. Glad to be able to help, Lakshmi journeys to India and arrives at "Happiness House" full of hope. But she soon learns the unthinkable truth: she has been sold into prostitution.
Check it out!
Gender Queer
By Maia Kobabe
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears.
Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.
Check it out!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Looking for Alaska
By John Green
First drink. First prank. First friend. First love.
Last words.
Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words--and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet François Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps." Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young, who will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.
Looking for Alaska brilliantly chronicles the indelible impact one life can have on another. A modern classic, this stunning debut marked #1 bestselling author John Green's arrival as a groundbreaking new voice in contemporary fiction.
Check it out!
All Boys Aren't Blue
By George M. Johnson
In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.
Check it out!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
The Bluest Eye
By Toni Morrison
Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison’s haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town’s prosperous black families, as well as its white families, Pecola lives with her alcoholic father and embittered, overworked mother in a shabby two-room storefront that reeks of the hopeless destitution that overwhelms their lives. In awe of her clean well-groomed schoolmates, and certain of her own intense ugliness, Pecola tries to make herself disappear as she wishes fervently, desperately for the blue eyes of a white girl. In her afterward to this novel, Morrison writes of the little girl she once knew: “Beauty was not simply something to behold, it was something one could do. The Bluest Eye was my effort to say something about that; to say something about why she had not, or possibly never would have, the experience of what she possessed and also why she prayed for so radical an alteration. Implicit in her desire was racial self-loathing. And twenty-years later I was still wondering about how one learns that. Who told her? Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak that what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale? The novel pecks away at the gaze that condemned her.
Check it out!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Tricks
By Ellen Hopkins
When all choice is taken from you, life becomes a game of survival.
Five teenagers from different parts of the country. Three girls. Two guys. Four straight. One gay. Some rich. Some poor. Some from great families. Some with no one at all. All living their lives as best they can, but all searching…for freedom, safety, community, family, love. What they don’t expect, though, is all that can happen when those powerful little words “I love you” are said for all the wrong reasons.
Five moving stories remain separate at first, then interweave to tell a larger, powerful story—a story about making choices, taking leaps of faith, falling down, and growing up. A story about kids figuring out what sex and love are all about, at all costs, while asking themselves, “Can I ever feel okay about myself?”
Check it out!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
By Stephen Chbosky
Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor. This haunting novel about the dilemma of passivity vs. passion marks the stunning debut of a provocative new voice in contemporary fiction: The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
This is the story of what it's like to grow up in high school. More intimate than a diary, Charlie's letters are singular and unique, hilarious and devastating. We may not know where he lives. We may not know to whom he is writing. All we know is the world he shares. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it puts him on a strange course through uncharted territory. The world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends. The world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when all one requires is that perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite.
Check it out!
Flamer
By Mike Curato
I know I’m not gay. Gay boys like other boys. I hate boys. They’re mean, and scary, and they’re always destroying something or saying something dumb or both.
I hate that word. Gay. It makes me feel . . . unsafe.
It's the summer between middle school and high school, and Aiden Navarro is away at camp. Everyone's going through changes―but for Aiden, the stakes feel higher. As he navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and spends time with Elias (a boy he can't stop thinking about), he finds himself on a path of self-discovery and acceptance.
Check it out!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
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Transcript
Banned Books
VIRTUAL ESCAPE ROOM
Special Collections
Main Collection
Oh no!
Reading Room
Circulation
Librarians need your help to stop book banning!
Censors are trying to remove important stories from history. Solve puzzles to save the books before they disappear. Enter the first room to help unlock the Research Help Desk, where your librarians fight to give you access to important books and information.
Popular Books
Research Help
Research Help
Research Help
Great work! You helped librarians protect these frequently challenged books!
Next
Special Collections
Main Collection
Oh no!
Reading Room
Popular Books are being targeted for censorship!
Circulation
Some of the most banned books are often for young adults, including titles like The Hunger Games and The Poet X. Enter the Popular Books room to protect these titles and more by uncovering a frequently banned book.
Popular Books
Research Help
Popular Books
1/3
Answer questions to uncover the banned book.
Question 1
Which award-winning graphic novel, that uses racial stereotypes to critique prejudice, has been banned in some schools?
Smile by Raina Telgemeier
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
Popular Books
2/3
Question 2
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has been banned and challenged in some schools for allegedly promoting what?
Witchcraft and the occult
Violence
Political rebellion
Popular Books
3/3
Question 3
Who is the author of A Court of Thorns and Roses, which is often banned and challenged for mature content and perceived negative influence on teens?
Suzanne Collins
Alice Oseman
Sarah J. Maas
Popular Books
3/3
Yes! You unlocked the Popular Books Collection!
Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give has been one of the most frequently challenged books in the U.S. since its 2017 release. It’s often banned or removed from libraries because it contains strong language and themes of racism, police brutality, and protests against systemic injustice.
Next
Special Collections
Main Collection
Oh no!
Reading Room
Circulation
Books in the Reading Room are being redacted!
In 2024, more than 2,400 books were targeted for censorship in schools and libraries. Enter the Reading Room to uncover a censored passage from a frequently challenged book.
Popular Books
Research Help
Reading Room
Fill in the blanks to prevent this book from censorship.
Reading Room
Great work! You stopped the censorship of Fahrenheit 451, a 1953 dystopian novel that portrays a fictional American society where books have been outlawed and burned.
“Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.”
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Next
Special Collections
Main Collection
Oh no!
Reading Room
The Main Collection is under attack for its content!
Circulation
Some of the most common reasons books are banned are because of themes related to race, LGBTQ+ identities, religion, violence, or language. However, these themes help us to understand different perspectives and can promote empathy. Enter the Main Collection to solve riddles to free some frequently challenged books.
Popular Books
Research Help
Main Collection
I tell of love, loss, and pain. A search for meaning, not in vain. Teens and tragedy fill my pages. But some say I’m “too raw” for certain ages.What book am I?
Main Collection
Mice and cats tell history’s fight. A family’s past in black and white. Some say it’s “too harsh” to see. Yet it shows truth and memory.What book am I?
Main Collection
In a world where women lose their voice, I’m forced to serve without a choice. My red cloak hides both fear and fight. But some say my story should stay out of sight.What book am I?
Main Collection
Great work! The Main Collection is open and knowledge is protected!
Book banning is harmful because it silences voices, erases important perspectives, limits personal choice, and denies communities the freedom to learn and think for themselves.
Next
Special Collections
Main Collection
Oh no!
Special Collections and Archives holds some of our most historical books at risk of being banned!
Reading Room
Circulation
Popular Books
The first recorded book ban in the United States was in 1637, when a religious pamphlet criticizing the Puritans was suppressed in Massachusetts. Enter Special Collections to find clues to uncover an important phrase.
Research Help
Special Collections
Special Collections
YES! The Special Collections and Archives are safe!
“Freedom to Read” is important because it protects our First Amendment rights, keeps voices and perspectives available, ensures everyone has access to stories, and focuses on the positive power of choice.
Next
Special Collections
Main Collection
Congratulations!
Reading Room
Circulation
You made it to the Circulation Desk to check out your books!
Popular Books
Exit the library to finish. But don't forget to visit the Turlock or Stockton campus library to find many of your favorite banned and challenged books!
Research Help
Click each book to learn more and borrow it from the University Library
Restart
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Crank
By Ellen Hopkins
Ellen Hopkins chronicles the turbulent and often disturbing relationship between Kristina, a character based on her own daughter, and the "monster," the highly addictive drug crystal meth, or "crank." Kristina is introduced to the drug while visiting her largely absent and ne'er-do-well father. While under the influence of the monster, Kristina discovers her sexy alter-ego, Bree: "there is no perfect daughter, / no gifted high school junior, / no Kristina Georgia Snow. / There is only Bree." Bree will do all the things good girl Kristina won't, including attracting the attention of dangerous boys who can provide her with a steady flow of crank.
Check it out!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
By Jesse Andrews
Greg Gaines is the last master of high school espionage, able to disappear at will into any social environment. He has only one friend, Earl, and together they spend their time making movies, their own incomprehensible versions of Coppola and Herzog cult classics. Until Greg’s mother forces him to rekindle his childhood friendship with Rachel. Rachel has been diagnosed with leukemia — cue extreme adolescent awkwardness — but a parental mandate has been issued and must be obeyed….
Check it out!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Sold
By Patricia McCormick
Lakshmi is a thirteen-year-old girl who lives with her family in a small hut on a mountain in Nepal. Though desperately poor, her life is full of simple pleasures, like playing hopscotch with her best friend from school, and having her mother brush her hair by the light of an oil lamp. But when the harsh Himalayan monsoons wash away all that remains of the family's crops, Lakshmi's stepfather says she must leave home and take a job to support her family. He introduces her to a glamorous stranger who tells her she will find her a job as a maid in the city. Glad to be able to help, Lakshmi journeys to India and arrives at "Happiness House" full of hope. But she soon learns the unthinkable truth: she has been sold into prostitution.
Check it out!
Gender Queer
By Maia Kobabe
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.
Check it out!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Looking for Alaska
By John Green
First drink. First prank. First friend. First love. Last words. Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words--and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet François Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps." Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young, who will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps. Looking for Alaska brilliantly chronicles the indelible impact one life can have on another. A modern classic, this stunning debut marked #1 bestselling author John Green's arrival as a groundbreaking new voice in contemporary fiction.
Check it out!
All Boys Aren't Blue
By George M. Johnson
In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.
Check it out!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
The Bluest Eye
By Toni Morrison
Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison’s haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town’s prosperous black families, as well as its white families, Pecola lives with her alcoholic father and embittered, overworked mother in a shabby two-room storefront that reeks of the hopeless destitution that overwhelms their lives. In awe of her clean well-groomed schoolmates, and certain of her own intense ugliness, Pecola tries to make herself disappear as she wishes fervently, desperately for the blue eyes of a white girl. In her afterward to this novel, Morrison writes of the little girl she once knew: “Beauty was not simply something to behold, it was something one could do. The Bluest Eye was my effort to say something about that; to say something about why she had not, or possibly never would have, the experience of what she possessed and also why she prayed for so radical an alteration. Implicit in her desire was racial self-loathing. And twenty-years later I was still wondering about how one learns that. Who told her? Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak that what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale? The novel pecks away at the gaze that condemned her.
Check it out!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
Tricks
By Ellen Hopkins
When all choice is taken from you, life becomes a game of survival. Five teenagers from different parts of the country. Three girls. Two guys. Four straight. One gay. Some rich. Some poor. Some from great families. Some with no one at all. All living their lives as best they can, but all searching…for freedom, safety, community, family, love. What they don’t expect, though, is all that can happen when those powerful little words “I love you” are said for all the wrong reasons. Five moving stories remain separate at first, then interweave to tell a larger, powerful story—a story about making choices, taking leaps of faith, falling down, and growing up. A story about kids figuring out what sex and love are all about, at all costs, while asking themselves, “Can I ever feel okay about myself?”
Check it out!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
By Stephen Chbosky
Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor. This haunting novel about the dilemma of passivity vs. passion marks the stunning debut of a provocative new voice in contemporary fiction: The Perks of Being a Wallflower. This is the story of what it's like to grow up in high school. More intimate than a diary, Charlie's letters are singular and unique, hilarious and devastating. We may not know where he lives. We may not know to whom he is writing. All we know is the world he shares. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it puts him on a strange course through uncharted territory. The world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends. The world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when all one requires is that perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite.
Check it out!
Flamer
By Mike Curato
I know I’m not gay. Gay boys like other boys. I hate boys. They’re mean, and scary, and they’re always destroying something or saying something dumb or both. I hate that word. Gay. It makes me feel . . . unsafe. It's the summer between middle school and high school, and Aiden Navarro is away at camp. Everyone's going through changes―but for Aiden, the stakes feel higher. As he navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and spends time with Elias (a boy he can't stop thinking about), he finds himself on a path of self-discovery and acceptance.
Check it out!
Oops! Looks like that book just got pulled off the shelf! Try again to protect these important stories!