Yes, Shine Is Banned!

Cat’s former best friend Patrick is brutally beaten and left for dead outside a gas station in their small North Carolina town. The police barely investigate. So Cat starts asking questions herself, pulling apart the town’s meth problem, its buried prejudices, and the tangle of relationships she’d spent years avoiding. Lauren Myracle wrote Shine as a mystery, but it’s really about what happens when a community decides some people matter less than others.

Myracle is one of the most banned authors in the country, and Shine is a frequent target. In 2022, Utah’s Alpine School District listed it among 52 books banned under H.B. 374. Tennessee’s Rutherford County Schools and South Carolina’s Beaufort County School District followed with challenges in 2023. The objections center on the book’s LGBTQ+ content, depictions of drug use, and violence, which is to say, the exact realities the book is trying to confront.

Why You Should Read This

Shine does something tricky: it puts you inside a town where everyone knows what happened and nobody wants to talk about it. Cat’s investigation isn’t some Nancy Drew caper. She’s wading through meth labs, homophobia, and her own guilt over abandoning Patrick years earlier. The mystery matters, but the real tension comes from watching Cat choose to see what she’d trained herself to ignore.

The book is set in the rural South, and Myracle treats it with respect. She doesn’t turn the town into a punchline or its people into caricatures. The bigotry is specific and personal, woven into families and friendships and Friday night routines. That specificity is what makes Shine burn. It’s easy to condemn hatred in the abstract. It’s harder when it’s wearing your neighbor’s face.