Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

Roughly 275 to 324 pages

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved takes as its inspiration the true story of an enslaved woman who killed her infant daughter to spare her a future of enslavement. This winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize appeared on the American Library Association’s list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books in 2006 and 2012. It also featured in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race between Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin. In 2016, then-governor McAuliffe vetoed the so-called “Beloved bill,” which would have enabled parents to opt their children out of reading books with “sexually explicit content” that had been assigned to them in school. One of Youngkin’s campaign ads highlighted a mother’s 2013 efforts to ban Beloved from her son’s high school; Youngkin ultimately won the 2021 election. In that 2021–22 school year, the ALA noted an “unprecedented volume of challenges” to books by and about people of color and that tackled such topics as racism and sexual or gender identities.

- New York Public Library