Utah faculties ban the guide ‘Wicked’ for good | EUROtoday

Utah public faculties have banned Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the Westfor good.

The darkish fantasy that reimagined creator L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, from the depraved witch’s perspective, is now amongst dozens of titles from the Utah State Board of Education’s record of banned books.

Wickedtogether with Stephen Chbosky’s Perks of Being a Wallflower and Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minuteswas reportedly added to the statewide record on Monday.

The transfer is in accordance wth Utah’s Sensitive Materials Law. The regulation was initially handed in 2022 and amended in 2024 to “identify and remove pornographic or indecent material.”

The novel was first eliminated within the Davis County, Tooele County and Washington County School Districts, native outlet KUTV reported. Since three college districts discovered the guide to comprise “objective sensitive materials,” it was banned statewide.

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Despite the favored Wicked movies which might be primarily based on Maguire’s guide being PG, the creator admitted his novel is totally different from the flicks and the Wicked Broadway present.

He mentioned his guide is “completely not for children,” in a November 2024 MassLive interview. “I purposefully put somewhat raunchy material in the first few pages of Wickedthe novel, to show what people were getting into.”

The Independent has reached out to Maguire and the Utah State Board of Education for remark.

Utah’s guide bans have been challenged in courtroom by a number of the affected authors.

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The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah filed a lawsuit earlier this week on behalf of authors Elana Ok. Arnold, Ellen Hopkins and Amy Reed, in addition to the property of creator Kurt Vonnegut, claiming the state’s book-banning efforts violate the First Amendment.

“The right to read and the right to free speech are inseparable. The First Amendment protects our freedom to read, learn, and share ideas free from unconstitutional censorship,” Tom Ford, legal professional on the ACLU of Utah, mentioned in a press release.

The banning of books is a nationwide subject, with the literary freedom advocacy group PEN America preserving tabs on guide bans since not less than 2021. According to the group’s Index of School Book Bans for 2024 by 2025, there have been greater than 6,700 novels banned inside college districts nationwide.