A 12-year-old scrolls through Tiktok, their screen lit up by faces of “Booktok” influencers that rate books based purely on their level of “spice.” Some influencers sometimes go as far to make videos purely to show these “spicy” scenes. Books like “A Court of Thorns and Roses” by Sarah J. Maas, “Icebreaker” by Hannah Grace and “Haunting Adeline” by H. D. Carlton have become increasingly popular with younger audiences despite, or maybe because of, their pages full of sexual content.

In Iowa, books with “sex acts” have been banned in public schools. However, these topics are allowed in health education materials and religious texts.
According to the Des Moines Register, over 3,400 books have been pulled from the shelves.
A majority of these books are fiction, but some of them are nonfiction and educational books. So where’s the line between censorship and free rein of books full of sexual content and no plot? It’s definitely not a clear one — we talked to Sin Luena ’25, Loren Barjis ’28 and Jill Hofmockel, one of West’s librarians, for their thoughts.

To start, let’s begin with Booktok, the nickname for a side of Tiktok devoted to discussing books. This arguably isn’t a bad thing — depending on which side of it you’re on. Booktok can be great for readers looking for book recommendations or trying to expand their literary horizons. 

However, mainstream Booktok keeps popularizing books that are… problematic, to say the least. 

Take “Icebreaker” by Hannah Grace, for example. This novel, a romance between two college athletes who grow close after being forced to share an ice rink, is becoming increasingly popular with younger readers, but it has multiple questionable sex scenes. Parents buy it for their kids, fooled by the pastel cartoons on the cover.

“Icebreaker” is rated 17+ by Common Sense Media and has an 18+ warning on the back of its cover for its amount of sexual content. To be honest, neither of us have read the book, but we have heard that there’s a sex scene while they’re in an Uber with their friends, and that says enough.

Generally it seems like the plot also isn’t great; the book has more reasons for its 17+ rating than actual content. Despite all its problems, the book sold over a million copies by 2024, after it was published in late 2022.

So many books like this keep going viral on TikTok: unassuming cartoony covers, pages filled with sex scenes and barely any plot. 

Don’t get us wrong, sex in a novel isn’t inherently a bad thing. Books like “Looking for Alaska” by John Green or “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison contain sexual content, but the sex scenes in many of these books are not graphic and are important to the plot or tell important stories about sexual abuse or rape.

And if you’re in high school and you want to read a “spicy” romance novel, who are we to stop you? But these novels aren’t meant for younger readers, especially those who are not old or mature enough to distinguish between healthy relationships and abuse.

At its core, romance should be about love and connection. Why are we teaching middle schoolers that romantic relationships are entirely based on sex? What happened to emotional connection?

“Read what you want, but consuming content like that, especially while your brain is developing, can really harm your idea of love,” Luena said.

There are also other books popularized by Booktok we’ve seen in the hands of middle schoolers; for example, “Haunting Adeline,” by H. D. Carlton and “It Ends with Us,” by Colleen Hoover. Both of these novels have been known for romanticizing abuse. 

“Haunting Adeline” is a dark romance novel about a girl who falls in love with her stalker with an infamous sex scene involving a gun and no consent. The main character’s extremely problematic relationship is admired by one side of the internet and is criticized (rightfully) by another. 

“It Ends with Us” is a novel based on the author’s personal experience with emotional and domestic abuse that has also been plagued with controversy.

Sure, there’s the reality of kids reading whatever they want, especially with the internet, but books like these should never be popularized with younger audiences. 

The push towards including sex scenes in young adult novels can be harmful to authors who want to keep sex out of their books. Barjis, who has written multiple novels, experienced this herself when she was agented for her young adult fantasy novel at the age of 14.

“[My agent] told me that, if I want the book to sell to a big five publisher, I need to implement a sex scene because what the basting publishing on right now: it’s all just tropes,” Barjis said. “I don’t think people realize that so many books are pumped out and they just keep pumping and pumping until they get one book that goes big on Booktok, and then when that happens, they just like this office.”

In an attempt to ban sexually explicit content from schools, the Iowa Legislature passed SF 496, which was signed into law by Gov. Kim Reynolds. This law contained many provisions, like banning instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation in grades K-6. One of them banned books containing “sex acts.”

The law faced an injunction by a federal judge after being originally passed in May 2023. The injunction allowed books that were pulled to go back on library shelves until the case was decided. It ultimately was vacated on August of 2024 and books were pulled from shelves again.

The law seems to find a line between censorship and having age-inappropriate books in schools, but clearly puts the line in the wrong place. 

A ban such as SF 496 means that all sorts of books have been banned, from classics like “1984” by George Orwell to educational materials to romance novels such as “Icebreaker.” The law is subjective and doesn’t provide a concrete guideline to what books should be banned, so it can easily be disproportionately weaponized against diverse books with LGBTQ or BIPOC representation. 

Books don’t just magically appear in schools because they have become popular; school librarians are responsible for curating collections of books for their schools. Part of curating those collections means not only adding books but also removing some. 

“One of the things that I think the law forgets exists is that [libraries] have always, especially school libraries, had reconsideration policies,” Hofmockel said. “My job is not just picking all the books to put in the library, but I also occasionally withdraw a book that I selected.”

For example, after she was recommended to add to the library’s romance section, she picked a few novels that she read good reviews about. However, after she read them, she decided they were too mature for high school.

“I bought a handful of what would be considered adult romances a couple years ago. They absolutely do have candy colored, cartoony covers. And I read through them, and I was like, ‘Oh, I think this is too spicy for a high school.’ I removed them from the collection. And if we are allowed to put [banned] books back, I’m not putting those titles [back].”

It’s also more complicated in high schools versus elementary and middle schools. At those lower levels, it makes sense not to have books with sex scenes. There are plenty of educational books like “101 Questions about Sex and Sexuality” by Faith Hickman Brynie that aim to teach young adults about sex, and some YA novels will contain fade-to-black scenes that approach the topic with respect and an understanding of their audience, especially when the book’s characters are minors.

And that’s the reality — minors have sex. That will happen regardless of whether there are books with sex in schools. So isn’t it important to educate them on it rather than censor the topic altogether?

It is so important that minors see healthy relationships properly depicted in literature. That not only goes for healthy relationships, but unhealthy ones too. Books need to depict sexual abuse for what it is — abuse.

“With the mind of a 12-year-old, they’re not very smart. They don’t know what’s okay and what’s not okay in relationships,” Luena said. “So knowing that they can go to a library, pick out a book that [criticizes] unhealthy age gaps, and be like, ‘Oh, this is what’s happening to me. This is not good. I should tell someone about it.’ That’s something that shouldn’t be banned.”

We can’t tell you what to read. As much as the government and students’ parents can try to censor certain topics, they can’t seem to, either.

But, in order to protect children from these topics, they must be properly taught about them in a safe environment. Sex and health education are necessary to ensure that kids don’t normalize or glamorize the wrong things, and that involves more than just teaching abstinence.

In the end, using that knowledge and maturity, the reader has to figure out what they’re getting themselves into.

Before diving into that “spicy” book that Booktok recommended, make sure to check its trigger warnings, do your research and think critically about what you’re reading. Enjoying a romance novel isn’t a bad thing, as long as you’re mature enough for it.

“You can’t really say that, ‘This is bad, this is good.’ But use common sense. If someone’s getting beat up, and then they fall in love with the person that’s beating them up, obviously, that’s not an okay love story,” Barjis said.