Breathless
by Jennifer Niven
A teen girl writes her own story.
For you if
you're a teenager who deserves a book that doesn't pretend you don't have a body.
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.
Buy New on Bookshop.orgSupports independent bookstores
— OR —
Find Used on Better World BooksSecondhand & sustainable
$13 MSRP · Paperback
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
Jennifer Niven wrote the book she needed at sixteen — the one nobody gave her. When Claude's dad walks out and her mom drags them both to a remote Georgia island, Claude doesn't wait to be rescued. She meets someone, she wants something, and she decides. Breathless is a summer romance that takes a teenage girl's desire completely seriously: her body is hers, her story is hers, and the feelings she's navigating — grief, lust, self-making — are worth 400 pages. That's not controversial. Except twenty school districts thought it was.
In effect right now
Somebody decided you shouldn’t read this. Read it this week.
It only works if nobody notices. Get a copy, pass it on, and tell the people who made the call that you did.
Twenty school districts came for this book — making it the second-most banned in the United States in 2024–2025 — not because it's pornographic, but because it refuses to treat a teenage girl's desire as something adults get to manage. Iowa's SF 496 provided the statutory fig leaf: 'descriptions of sex acts.' What the law actually targeted was a girl who chooses what happens with her body, on her own terms, in the middle of her family falling apart. The stated reason is content. The real reason is agency. P&P stocks it because the books that tell young women their bodies belong to them have always been the first ones pulled.
The record
Utah
2026
Removed statewide (state law or state board rule) · Every public K–12 school
Public libraries (students may not bring copies to school)
Initiated by: government or statute
In effect nowLast verified Oct 2, 2026Source ↗
Where This Book Lives
Breathless sits closer to the beach-read end of the P&P spectrum, and that's intentional — not every book here needs to be a systems manual. Niven wrote the book she needed at sixteen: a summer romance that treats teenage desire as valid, teenage grief as real, and a girl's choices about her own body as actually hers to make. The book became the second-most banned title in the country for 2024–2025, pulled from twenty school districts — which tells you exactly how threatening it is to let young women author their own lives. We're stocking it because what gets banned is often what teenagers most need to read.
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe(2023)
dir. Aitch Alberto
One summer, secrets neither boy knew he had.
In 1987 El Paso, two Mexican-American teenage loners strike up a friendship that cracks open everything one of them has spent years keeping carefully closed off — including who he is. Adapted from Benjamin Alire Sáenz's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in its tenderness rather than its edge — a bilingual, bicultural, queer coming-of-age story that doesn't need trauma to justify its own gentleness. Pedagogical in showing how friendship can crack open a kid who's spent years protecting himself by staying closed.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress(2002)
dir. Dai Sijie
Banned books, secret readings, and one crush.
Two city students sent to a remote mountain village for Maoist "re-education" during the Cultural Revolution discover a hidden suitcase of banned Western novels — and use them to woo the local tailor's granddaughter. Adapted from Dai Sijie's own novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in treating banned Western novels as genuinely dangerous contraband — literature here isn't decoration, it's the thing state re-education is specifically designed to purge. Pedagogical in showing how forbidden art still gets in, and still changes people, even under total surveillance.
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
All Boys Aren't Blue
George M. Johnson
A Black queer memoir they tried to erase from schools
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Blankets
Craig Thompson
The memoir that proved comics could break your heart.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack
Richard Ovenden
Knowledge was always the target.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Forever...
Judy Blume
The teen novel they banned for telling the truth.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
All Boys Aren't Blue
George M. Johnson
A Black queer memoir they tried to erase from schools
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Blankets
Craig Thompson
The memoir that proved comics could break your heart.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Boys & Sex
Peggy Orenstein
Ask boys about sex. Then listen.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack
Richard Ovenden
Knowledge was always the target.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Sherman Alexie
A reservation kid goes to the white school. Everyone loses.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Darius the Great Is Not Okay
Adib Khorram
Half-Iranian, depressed, going to Iran. He finds himself there.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
It Ain't So Awful, Falafel
Firoozeh Dumas
Iranian American in 1979. Her country is on the news. Not in a good way.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Before the Ever After
Jacqueline Woodson
His dad was a football star. Something is changing. He watches.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST