“PEN America today released new documentation of public school book bans for the full 2023-2024 school year, recording 10,046 instances of books banned nationwide, a dramatic 200 percent rise over the previous school year. Since 2021, the free expression organization has counted close to 16,000 instances of book bans in public schools.” “Nineteen Minutes by bestselling author Jodi Picoult was the most commonly banned book during the last school year. It is among 19 titles banned in 50 or more school districts. The next most frequently banned titles were: Looking for Alaska by John Green; The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky; Sold by Patricia McCormick, and Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher. “Having the most banned book in the country is not a badge of honor – it’s a call for alarm,” Picoult said. “Nineteen Minutes is banned not because it’s about a school shooting, but because of a single page that depicts a date rape and uses anatomically correct words for the human body. It is not gratuitous or salacious, and it is not – as the book banners claim – porn. In fact, hundreds of kids have told me that reading Nineteen Minutes stopped them from committing a school shooting, or showed them they were not alone in feeling isolated. My book, and the ten thousand others that have been pulled off school library shelves this year, give kids a tool to deal with an increasingly divided and difficult world. These book banners aren’t helping children. They are harming them.”