As librarians gather in Chicago for the annual meeting of the American Library Association, alarm bells about book banning continue to sound. It isn’t news that books by and about LGBTQ+ people and people of color are special targets for censors, but the crusade continues with no signs of abating. As PEN America notes in its recent report, “Facts & Fiction: Stories Stripped Away by Book Bans,” 44% of the fiction and nonfiction titles challenged in the 2024-25 school year featured people of color, and 39% featured queer people.
The real headline, however, was the increase in nonfiction titles that are being targeted by book bans: up 14% in the past school year and now accounting for 29% of all banned books. In a world where facts seem to be under assault daily, this development doesn’t really come as a surprise. But the potential effects are particularly disturbing. “Exposure to nonfiction increases students’ critical thinking abilities,” the report continues, which is important “in an era where young people are increasingly exposed to dis- and misinformation through social media and AI.”
Fortunately, we at Kirkus continue to see a robust slate of nonfiction for young readers. Here are just a few of the YA titles that have received starred reviews in recent months.
Honor by Nataliia Mariichyn, Leon Buchwald, and Susan McClelland (Astra Young Readers, June 9): One of the most challenged titles in the PEN America report is Elie Wiesel’s Night. Readers of that powerful Holocaust memoir might seek out Mariichyn’s account of growing up in post-Soviet Ukraine, where she discovered a cache of letters revealing how her family sheltered a young Jewish boy, Eliezer Buchwald, from the Nazis during the Second World War.
The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America by David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels (Knopf, April 21): Books about activism are frequently targeted, PEN America found. This history of the early days of the AIDS epidemic offers vital evidence of how community organizing, through groups like ACT UP, enabled people with HIV and AIDS to fight for their rights and their health care in the 1980s and ’90s, when the wider world was largely indifferent.
How To Survive the End of the World: A Graphic Exploration of How To (Maybe) Avoid Extinction by Katy Doughty (MITeen Press/Candlewick, March 31): Looking to past cataclysms like the Black Death, as well as at future doomsday scenarios such as climate change and AI “killer machines,” the author and illustrator of this work of graphic nonfiction “has distilled an impressive amount of research into a lucid, matter-of-fact narrative,” according to our reviewer, along with something more surprising: optimism.
Defying China: A Memoir by Tsultrim Dolma and Rebecca Wei Hsieh (Dial Books, March 10): Dolma grew up in a poor village in the mountains of Chinese-occupied Tibet; joined the Tibetan protest movement, seeking independence from the People’s Republic, as a teen; was incarcerated by the Chinese; and eventually made her way, as a refugee, to the United States. Her story shines a light on a part of the world we rarely hear about in the West.
Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.
