Yes, All American Boys Is Banned!

Rashad is a Black teenager who gets brutally beaten by a white police officer in a convenience store over a misunderstanding. Quinn is a white teenager who witnesses the beating. The novel alternates between their perspectives as the incident ripples through their school and community. Jason Reynolds wrote Rashad’s chapters; Brendan Kiely wrote Quinn’s. Together they produced one of the most challenged YA novels of the past decade.

In South Carolina, police officers spoke out against the book being taught in schools, calling it anti-police. Somerset County Public Schools in Maryland faced challenges in 2020 from a parent who cited “foul and vulgar language” and “divisive topics,” despite the book being part of the curriculum since 2016. The novel has been banned or challenged in Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania, with objections ranging from profanity and drug use to promoting “anti-police views” and being “too much of a sensitive matter right now.”

Why You Should Read This

The dual-narrator structure is what gives the book its punch. Rashad’s experience is specific and physical: the beating, the hospital, the bruises that won’t fade, the fury and helplessness. Quinn’s chapters track a different kind of reckoning: the cost of speaking up when the cop who beat Rashad is practically family. Neither perspective lets you off the hook.

Reynolds and Kiely wrote the book together because the conversation about race and policing requires more than one voice. The result feels honest in a way that single-author novels about race rarely achieve. Rashad isn’t a symbol. Quinn isn’t a white savior. They’re two kids trying to figure out what to do when the world splits open in front of them. The book doesn’t pretend there are easy answers. It just insists that looking away isn’t one of them.