The American Library Association has just announced its 2025 Rainbow Book List of over 175 librarian-approved titles “celebrating LGBTQIA+ youth and families.” Let’s look more closely at these books for children and teens, why they matter, and some exclusive charts showing trends over the years.
The 2025 Rainbow Book List
This year, the Rainbow Book List Committee of the American Library Association’s (ALA’s) Rainbow Round Table reviewed more than 550 books published between July 1, 2023 and December 31, 2024, and selected over 175 fiction and non-fiction titles for toddlers through young adults, a respectable second place to 2023’s record of 193, and more than double what it was not so long ago in 2018. (See charts below.)
Unlike the Stonewall Awards, which recognize only a very few titles at the peak of excellence, the Rainbow Book List is a larger but still selective collection, intended to help librarians, educators, parents, and others find “quality books with significant and authentic LGBTQIA+ content,” as the Rainbow Book List website has said (though it is offline as of this writing).
As they have done in previous years, the committee chose Top 10 Titles for Young Readers and Top 10 Titles for Teen Readers from the full list of 175. Here are the (unordered) ones for young readers (through middle grade)—click the images to read my own reviews:
Check out the complete list of titles (PDF) posted by the ALA to see the ones for teens (which I love but don’t typically cover here) and the full lists for all ages.
My own Mombian Database of LGBTQ Family Books includes more titles with a wider range of quality, from excellent to less so (which I try to indicate), to help people who may come across any of the books and want some guidance, or be looking for representation that may only appear in a book whose literary or artistic quality doesn’t quite meet the Rainbow Book List’s standards. I could debate a few titles I really liked that didn’t make their list, and there’s one title in their Top Ten this year (Family Is Family) that I felt was really falling back on old tropes, but I’m not going to argue about books with librarians. I’d like to think there’s a need for many opinions and approaches. My database also only includes children’s books up through middle grade (and books for LGBTQ parents); it doesn’t cover YA since I’m only one person and need to sleep.
Why the Rainbow Book List Matters
The Rainbow Book List can help librarians advise readers, add to their collections, and ensure children and youth of all ages have access to quality, inclusive books. It offers the imprimatur of the oldest and largest library association in the world, which can help convince communities to keep these books on the shelves. Given the ongoing attempts to ban or restrict LGBTQ-inclusive books, that is more important than ever. As the committee noted when it released the list:
With the attacks against and removal of so many queer stories from public and school libraries, the existence of this list is vital to continue to assist librarians, educators, caregivers, LGBTQIA+ members, and community allies in selecting quality LGBTQIA+ stories to include in their collections. Over the last few years, our job as librarians to fight for the inclusion of stories that reflect and celebrate the existence of all genders and sexual identities has become increasingly difficult. Unfortunately, the fact that this list exists will anger those individuals who wish to erase and censor queer identities and challenge titles in library collections.
At the same time, the committee said:
And through it all, we remain encouraged that so many queer stories are continuing to be told. The experiences of LGBTQIA+ youth and families deserve to be represented and included in ALL library collections. It is our hope that the work of this committee will help stakeholders be intentional about including these stories in their collections and libraries. And to those who support and use this list, we thank you.
The Big Picture
Below are updated versions of two charts I first created a number of years ago. (See Notes on Method below for how I’ve tried to keep consistency over time.) The first shows the number of Rainbow Book List titles since the list’s founding in 2008. (The 2008 list covered books published between 2005-2007; each subsequent list covered the year and a half before the list’s publication.) Even this doesn’t fully show the sweeping change in LGBTQ-inclusive titles, though; several of the committee’s picture book picks in the earlier years, for example, had vague or allegorical queer content. Today’s books, on the whole, are more likely to show clearly queer characters. You’ll see the big leap starting with 2019’s list, which covered books published between July 2017 and December 2018.
The second chart shows the number of books the Committee evaluated each year before making their final selections. This chart starts in 2013, when they began regularly reporting this data. Again, the big jump was in 2019’s list, covering books published mid-2017 through 2018.
The fact that the committee still evaluates so many titles and selects a much smaller number, however (averaging 24% since 2013), speaks both to the growing number of LGBTQ-inclusive books being published and the fact that many of them still have a ways to go in terms of quality and “significant and authentic” LGBTQ content. Let’s hope that authors find ways of improving their skills and getting feedback on their drafts. I’ll also suggest that prospective authors read widely among existing LGBTQ-inclusive kids’ books and other diverse children’s titles before embarking on their own efforts.
For a bit of history, here’s my interview with Nel Ward, chair of the Rainbow Book List Committee when it launched in 2008. It’s been a pleasure watching the number of titles grow and diversify over the years.
As always, many thanks to the librarians who put together the Rainbow Book List and to all of the librarians everywhere whose recommendations and support (often in the face of increasingly harsh opposition) continue to positively impact the lives of so many young people and families. Thanks, too, to the authors, illustrators, and publishers creating these books for the readers who need them.
Please also check out my earlier post about this year’s ALA Youth Media Awards, which honored LGBTQ-inclusive kids’ books (among others) in different ways.
Notes on method:
- The most recent Rainbow Lists separate Preschool and Early Elementary; I’ve counted them all as Picture Books to keep the chart consistent with previous years.
- In recent years, the Rainbow List has broken out “Upper Elementary,” which they’ve also sometimes called “Juvenile Fiction”; I’ve kept these books with Middle Grade, again to keep the chart consistent across all years.
- Graphic/Manga includes both middle grade and YA titles, since the Rainbow List used to break both out into their own Graphic category but now doesn’t. I’ve done so to keep the chart consistent. I also counted Graphic/Manga series of more than one book as one, since this is how the Committee lists them.
- Slight differences in counting shouldn’t obscure the fact that the overall number of LGBTQ-inclusive books for kids and youth has skyrocketed starting in about 2017.
- I’ve hand counted the number of titles from the Rainbow Book List document; I am not affiliated with the Committee and all errors in tabulation and charting are my own.
