Boy Toy

About Boy Toy

Boy Toy is a young adult novel by Barry Lyga, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2007. It is one of the most challenged and removed books in American schools over the past two decades, and it is easy to understand why it makes some adults uncomfortable — because it addresses, with unflinching honesty, a subject that many institutions would rather not discuss: the sexual abuse of a young boy by an adult woman in a position of authority.

Josh Mendel is eighteen years old when the novel begins. When he was twelve, his seventh-grade history teacher, Eve Sherman, began grooming him, and by the time he was thirteen, the abuse had escalated to a sexual relationship. He reported it, she went to prison, and now, five years later, Josh is trying to be a senior in high school while carrying something that has affected everything about his development: his ability to trust people, his sense of his own body, his relationship to sex and intimacy.

What Makes This Book Important

The premise reflects a genuine gap in how abuse is discussed in American culture. When the perpetrator is a woman and the victim is a teenage boy, the abuse is frequently minimized — described as a "relationship," as something the boy should feel lucky about, as categorically different from what it actually is. Lyga refuses that framing. The novel insists, precisely and persistently, that what happened to Josh was abuse, that it damaged him, and that the cultural scripts around male victimhood made it harder for him to get help.

Josh's voice is complex and sometimes troubling — he still has conflicted feelings about Eve, which is realistic. Survivors of abuse by trusted adults frequently do. That complexity is part of what makes the book valuable and part of what has made it a target for removal. It is not a simple story with simple lessons.

The novel was praised by mental health professionals and abuse prevention advocates for its accuracy in depicting grooming and the long-term psychological effects of childhood sexual abuse. It won the Maryland Black-Eyed Susan Book Award and was nominated for multiple other honors.

Why It Has Been Banned

Boy Toy is one of the most widely banned books in the country, removed from school districts across Florida, Iowa, Texas, Wisconsin, Virginia, Maine, and North Carolina — 28 school districts in total. Challenges consistently cite sexual content and the age of the protagonist during the abuse.

The cruel irony of removing a book about child sexual abuse from schools — institutions whose failure to recognize and address abuse is itself a documented problem — has not been lost on advocates for the book. The novel does not include gratuitous content. It depicts abuse and its aftermath in a way designed to help readers recognize and name it. Removing it from libraries where young people might encounter it, and where they might for the first time see their own experience reflected and validated, is not a neutral act.