Park City residents launch Banned Book Babes in response to Utah’s growing school library restrictions

The Banned Book Babes Book Club will hold its first meeting Tuesday, March 10, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Lectura Lounge, 1960 Sidewinder Drive, Suite 106, in Park City. The club will read and discuss books banned from Utah public schools. Space is capped at 25. For more information, visit caseyandcharleys.org. Graphic courtesy Banned Book Babes Book Club. Photo: Banned Book Babes Club

PARK CITY, Utah — Two Park City women are turning their frustration over Utah’s school book bans into community action, launching a new book club dedicated to the very titles that have been pulled from public school shelves across the state.

Monica Schaffer, a local pediatrician, and Judy Silver, a former Connecticut public school English teacher, will host the inaugural meeting of the Banned Book Babes Book Club on Tuesday, March 10, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Lectura Lounge, 1960 Sidewinder Drive, Suite 106.

The club will read, discuss, and analyze books banned in Utah. The first title is “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky, which Silver says she taught extensively during her teaching career. Heidi Matthews, a library media teacher at Park City High School, a former Utah Education Association president, and an educator with 36 years of experience, will open the evening with a brief presentation. Participants are asked to bring a book for a swap and a dessert to share. Attendance is capped at 25; as of this week, 11 people had already signed up.

Maritza Roño Refuerzo, co-founder of the Lectura Lounge — a bilingual literacy nonprofit operating under Casey & Charley’s Foundation for Dogs and Kids — agreed to host the club.

Utah’s growing list

Utah now has 23 titles banned from all public school libraries statewide, making it the national leader in state-mandated school book bans. The most recent addition, Stephen King’s “Bag of Bones,” was added Feb. 13. Earlier this year, three titles were added at once: “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” Jodi Picoult’s “Nineteen Minutes” — which debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list in 2007 — and “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” by Gregory Maguire, the 1995 novel that inspired the Broadway musical and its recent film adaptation.

The statewide bans are triggered by H.B. 29, a 2024 law that expanded on earlier 2022 legislation, H.B. 374, the Sensitive Materials in Schools Act. Under H.B. 29, if three school districts — or two districts and five charter schools — remove a book for containing what state code defines as “objective sensitive material,” the book must be pulled from every public school in the state. The law affects more than 670,000 public school students across Utah’s 41 districts and more than 100 charter schools.

Critics of the law argue that the threshold is dangerously low: fewer than 10% of the state’s districts and charter schools can effectively determine what is available in every school library across the state. Two districts — Davis and Washington — account for the majority of removals that have triggered statewide bans.

A federal lawsuit

The legal battle over Utah’s book policies intensified Jan. 6 when the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Utah on behalf of the estate of Kurt Vonnegut, authors Elana K. Arnold, Ellen Hopkins, and Amy Reed, and two anonymous Utah public high school students. Defendants include Utah Attorney General Derek Brown, the Utah State Board of Education and its members, and the school districts of Davis, Salt Lake City, and Washington County, along with their superintendents.

The lawsuit, Vonnegut v. Utah, argues that H.B. 29 is unconstitutionally overbroad under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Plaintiffs contend that the law removes books “not because they lack literary merit, but because they acknowledge that topics like human sexuality and sexual assault exist as part of the broader human experience.” They are asking a federal judge to declare the statewide bans unconstitutional and order all removed books returned to shelves.

Local roots

Schaffer and Silver say they became increasingly alarmed as the ban list grew this winter. For Silver, who taught “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” in her Connecticut classroom, the book’s removal hit close to home. Chbosky has said publicly that he has received letters from teens telling him the novel — which addresses mental health, suicide, substance use, sexuality, and bullying — gave them enough hope to keep going.

“Banning explicit material does not mean teens are not exposed to it,” said Schaffer’s 22-year-old daughter. “It just means that kids are exposed to the same material in media, often without context.”

Both women attended a Let Utah Read “Read-In protest at the Capitol last month, joining participants who dressed up and brought banned books to read aloud. Speakers included Utah state Rep. John Arthur, banned author Abdi Nazemian, and Rebekah Cummings, co-founder of Let Utah Read and former president of the Utah Library Association. High school junior McKenzie Compton, daughter of Summit County Library Director Dan Compton, also addressed the crowd.

“We do not want the government controlling what we can and cannot consume,” Compton said. “We as students have become disappointed and fearful of what is happening within our school system, and we want to find a way to change.”

Schaffer first became engaged with the issue after attending a League of Women Voters luncheon where speakers from Let Utah Read and PEN America addressed book banning as the year’s featured issue. She later saw “The Librarians,” a 2025 Sundance documentary available to stream on PBS’s YouTube channel, which chronicles coordinated efforts to remove books from public schools and the professional and personal toll those efforts took on school librarians.

The broader pattern

Advocates note that the books targeted in Utah disproportionately represent voices that have historically been marginalized. Of the 23 titles currently banned statewide, many are by women and authors of color, or feature LGBTQ+ characters or themes.

“Book-banning disproportionately affects women, people of color, and sexual minorities, who arguably may need these stories the most,” Schaffer said.

To RSVP for the March 10 meeting — space is limited to 25 — contact Monica Schaffer at schaffer.m@me.com, Judy Silver at judysilverado@gmail.com, or Maritza Roño Refuerzo at maritza@caseyandcharleys.org.