Two of my great literary loves — banned books and Little Free Libraries — are at the heart of Kirsten Miller’s aptly titled “Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books,” and yet I still managed to underestimate this excellent story. Through this warmhearted satire set in small-town Georgia, Miller introduces us to a multifaceted cast of characters who are all in some way negatively affected by censorship.
It all starts when a couple of angels go down to Georgia to teach our titular villain, the holier-than-thou Lula Dean, a lesson about book banning. Lula Dean has been all hopped up on righteous anger ever since she found a book on erotic cake baking at the local library. Some high school kids stuck it there as a prank, but that’s all the reason Lula Dean needs to kick off a censorship campaign in hopes of getting Troy, Georgia, back on the path of the straight and narrow.
“When you have everything, the only luxury left is taking things away from others. It was an indulgence that Lula Dean certainly seemed to relish,” Miller writes.
People are also reading…
Samantha Koon Jones
Lula Dean places a free book box in her yard, offering up exclusively the titles she deems appropriate — things like Southern etiquette guides, kid detective novels and Confederate history books. But angels — or someone — start wrapping banned and challenged books in dust jackets from Lula Dean’s collection. The story unfolds as the books move through the community, finding the right hearts to touch along the way.
A copy of Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl” finds its way to Dawn, the mother of a young man with a budding interest in White supremacy, just as her son is caught drawing a swastika on the door of a Jewish neighbor, Mr. Stempel.
“[Dawn] knew the Nazis were bad, but they were villains from a story so far removed from her own life it might as well have been Star Wars,” Miller writes. Dawn is touched by Frank’s diary, then utterly horrified to see antisemitism promoted by her son’s own hand.
“Hate is a disease, Dawn,” Mr. Stempel explains, adding that “truth” is the cure. “It won’t work on everyone. But maybe your son isn’t too far gone,” he says.
While it’s alarming that a grown woman might not know who Anne Frank is — and worse yet, ask an elderly Jewish man to explain the abrupt ending of her diary — the fact remains that we don’t know what we don’t know.
“Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books” is a satire, and one that, as evidenced by the above dialogue, inches into cheesy territory to prove a point from time to time. Miller offers up reading a potential solution to all of society’s ills. While that’s quite an oversimplification, reading diverse stories is not a bad place to start one’s journey to tolerance and loving one’s neighbor.
My favorite vignette occurs when a boy named Beau picks up a copy of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” disguised as another title from Lula Dean’s library. Beau’s mother, who is under the impression that her eldest son came out as gay because of a book he read, is horrified to learn her son is reading Judy Blume’s 50-year-old middle-grade masterpiece. Beau learns some very basic facts about menstruation from Blume’s iconic but frequently challenged novel; it is eventually revealed that nearly every woman in Troy — including those seeking to remove the title from the library — had read the book at some point in their adolescences.
“‘[Getting your period] is just part of being a girl. That’s what I learned from the book. I also found out that girls can be funny. Underneath it all, they’re just regular people,” Beau explains to his mother. And just like that, Troy gained another feminist.
Tensions are high when Troy’s mayor steps down after a scandal. Lula Dean seeks to fill his seat, but her longtime rival, Beverly Underwood, enters the race as well, fearing for the town’s future with Lula Dean at the helm. By this point, the political conversation has expanded to include discussion of taking down a statue in Troy commemorating a local Confederate general.
The town is gearing up for an epic showdown between the two mayoral hopefuls, Southern-style.
“Would Beverly and Lula both attend services at First Baptist Church? If so, would their showdown take place before the sermon, after the sermon, or (as some clearly hoped) during the sermon? If it came to blows (an unlikely outcome but one that could not be dismissed entirely), who would prevail, Lula or Beverly? And — most important — whose side would Jesus take?” Miller writes.
Author Kirsten Miller was born in the mountains of North Carolina but lives in Brooklyn, New York, today.
The ending is complicated but generally positive, with the flawed townspeople realizing the dangers of censorship and bigotry. I can’t speak to why the citizens of Troy were so wholly disinterested in diverse voices at the start of the novel, but if Lula Dean had succeeded in her book-banning endeavor, the community might never have the means to lift itself out of ignorance.
The banned books in Lula Dean’s library “had opened eyes, granted courage and exposed terrible crimes. That’s why they were dangerous, why so many people wanted to hide them,” Miller writes.
I think “Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books” is a fantastic work of contemporary fiction, one that lays bare many of the social problems prevalent in the South, but also one that holds space for hope, change and a happy ending — if we want one.
Samantha Koon Jones is a book critic for The Daily Progress. A longtime Charlottesville resident, she graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in English and previously worked for The Daily Progress as a news reporter. A prolific reader of both fiction and nonfiction, Jones has a special interest in translated literature, speculative fiction and celebrity memoirs. She can be found on Instagram at @_bookstasam.
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