A Court of Thorns and Roses (Sarah J. Maas)

A Court of Thorns and Roses is the first book in Sarah J. Maas’s five-book romantasy series, published in 2015. It follows 19-year-old Feyre, a mortal huntress who is dragged to a magical land and falls for her immortal captor.

The book is not banned across the United States, but it is one of the few titles removed at state level. In August 2024, Utah published its first list of 13 books to be removed from all public schools in the state under a new law, and A Court of Thorns and Roses was on it. PEN America’s list of books banned statewide in Utah, which counts 44 titles as of September 2026, still includes it.

How the Utah law works: if three school districts (or two districts and five charter schools) decide a book contains “objective sensitive material”, it is removed from every public school in the state. PEN America cites reporting that nearly all of the bans so far came from just two districts.

Elsewhere, PEN America recorded bans in 16 school districts in 2024-25, and Maas was the third most banned author that year with 162 bans, behind Stephen King and Ellen Hopkins. The American Library Association documented 324 challenges to 17 of her titles in 2023, the most attempts to censor one author’s work in a single year.

Why it was challenged: complaints focus on the book’s sexual content, which Utah’s law treats as grounds for removal if it is judged pornographic or indecent. Defenders, including the president of the Utah School Library Association, say the sexual content is often taken out of context.

Latest data: PEN America’s 2025-26 list includes two other Maas novels, Kingdom of Ash (21 bans) and Empire of Storms (20 bans), but not this one. Another romantasy title, Storm and Fury, is also on Utah’s statewide list, as is Nineteen Minutes.