Yes, Smoke Is Banned!

Ellen Hopkins’s Smoke picks up after the shattering ending of Burned. Pattyn Von Stratten is reeling from loss, and her younger sister Jackie is beginning to follow the same path of rebellion against their abusive father and restrictive religious community. The novel alternates between the sisters’ perspectives in verse, tracing how trauma perpetuates itself within families and how the cycle of abuse and control becomes harder to escape with each generation. Hopkins doesn’t offer easy resolutions. The book is raw, dark, and honest about how violence begets violence.

Smoke was challenged 10 times in the 2024-2025 PEN America data, with bans in Colorado, Florida, and Tennessee school districts. As the sequel to Burned, it inherits all of that book’s controversies and adds more: the violence escalates, the stakes are higher, and Hopkins’s refusal to provide comforting endings makes the book harder to dismiss as merely sensational. The Hopkins catalog on ban lists now includes Burned, Smoke, Crank, Glass, Fallout, Tilt, Perfect, Impulse, Traffick, and The You I’ve Never Known. At a certain point, banning Ellen Hopkins books stops being about individual titles and becomes a referendum on whether teenagers should have access to honest depictions of their own worst experiences.