5 books banned in Utah in under a month.
On Friday 13, 2026, Bag of Bones by Stephen King met the threshold to be banned statewide. On Monday March 4, 2026, Breathless by Jennifer Niven, The Carnival at Bray by Jessie Ann Foley, The Handmaid’s Tale (graphic novel) by Margaret Atwood, and Red Hood by Elana K. Arnold were banned.
That’s 5 books banned in under a month.
We made it easy to email the State Board of Education and make your voice heard!
It’s now in the hands of the Utah State Board of Education; they have 30 days to vote to overturn it and allow it back into our state’s high schools. (Make no mistake, for all the talk of getting banned books out of the hands of “children”, these books were never in elementary schools.)
The deadline for voting to overturn the statewide ban on Breathless, The Carnival at Bray, The Handmaid’s Tale (graphic novel), and Red Hood is April 1st. Bag of Bones has until March 15th.
So let’s take a minute and look at the books and authors that have been banned.
Stephen King needs no introduction; he’s that rare author who’s become part of the cultural zeitgeist, known by people who love to read and people who don’t. For many of us, Stephen King was an author that got us into reading or introduced us to a love for horror. Utah high schoolers deserve the same chance we had to find an author they can love their whole lives.
Breathless by Jennifer Niven is about a high school graduate during her last summer before college. It’s described as a novel about self-discovery and first love. The Carnival at Bray, another story of self-discovery and first love, follows a 16 year old girl as she’s uprooted from the States to Ireland and learns to navigate life. It has won multiple awards, including being named to the American Library Association's one of the 10 “Best Fiction for Young Adults” and was shortlisted for the Michael L. Printz Award for Literary Merit.
Margaret Atwood, like Stephen King, probably needs no introduction. She’s a multiple award (too many to list here) winning author and poet including two Booker prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award. The Handmaid's Tale is an Arthur C. Clarke Award winning dystopian novel of a patriarchal, totalitarian regime where women (handmaids) are owned by men for the purposes of having children. Originally published in 1985, it has been adapted to film, theater, tv, and a graphic novel in 2019. It’s this last one which is banned statewide.
Finally, we have Red Hood by Elana K. Arnold, which is a gender-flipped modern retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. Multiple reviewers have called this tale “empowering”, as the main character, Bisou, discovers power inside her she didn’t know she had.
We made it easy to email the State Board of Education and make your voice heard!
Because 3 school districts decided these books weren’t right for their students now all students are being penalized by having these novels removed from their schools.
Please, the clock is ticking…Tell USBE Board members to vote at their next meeting to preserve local control of our schools so that the overreach of state politicians doesn’t force local communities to purge books from their school libraries.