Yes, This Is Kind of an Epic Love Story Is Banned!

Kacen Callender’s YA novel follows Nathan Bird, a biracial teenager obsessed with film who is slowly realizing that his feelings for his best friend Oliver are more than platonic. Set against the backdrop of Nathan’s single-parent household and his complicated social dynamics, the book is a coming-out story that treats queerness not as a crisis but as a natural, if sometimes scary, part of figuring out who you are. Callender, a National Book Award winner for King and the Dragonflies, writes with warmth and specificity about the Black queer teen experience.

This Is Kind of an Epic Love Story was challenged 11 times in the 2024-2025 PEN America data, with bans across Florida and Tennessee school districts. The challenges cite LGBTQ+ content, a category that accounts for a disproportionate share of all book bans nationwide. Callender has been vocal about the impact of book bans on queer youth of color, noting that for many teens, books are the first place they see themselves represented. The novel’s title, with its self-aware hedging (‘kind of’), captures the tentative, uncertain quality of first love, precisely the feeling that challengers want to prevent queer teens from seeing reflected back at them.