One app, billions of views and a flood of pastel-covered books with plots that are anything but PG.

Welcome to BookTok, where the romance is spicy, the blurbs are vague, and teens are learning about the birds and the bees from scenes more graphic than anything in school sex-ed.

So what’s behind the boom in steamy reads and is it time we stopped whispering about it?

Originally self-published in 2022, Icebreaker by Hannah Grace was re-released by Simon & Schuster in 2023 after going viral on TikTok. It has since sold over one million copies worldwide. Photo: Olivia Fuderer.