Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller

From the author of The Change, comes a novel about book banning and those brave enough to stand up against this censorship.

IT’S TIME TO RISE UP

In Troy, Georgia, local woman Lula Dean has campaigned to cleanse the town’s reading habits. All the ‘disgusting’, ‘pornographic’ and downright ‘un-American’ books have been removed from public spaces. Now, the townspeople are only allowed to read ‘appropriate’ books from Lula’s personal lending library.

But a small group refuse to be told what they can and cannot read and, unbeknownst to Lula, her personal collection is slowly restocked with banned books: literary classics, gay romances, Black history, spell books, and more.

One by one, each person who borrows the books from Lula’s library find their lives changed in unexpected ways. And as they begin to reveal their new selves, it’s clear that a showdown is fast approaching – one that will change the town of Troy forever…

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Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books was a book that I picked up on a whim when in Nice earlier this year.  I was immediately encouraged when the bookseller at Read the Room mentioned it had been a book club choice and that he’d very much enjoyed it.

Set in the town of Troy, Georgia, the reader is introduced to a community at odds with one another as the residents must take sides in Lula Dean’s mission to ban books from schools and libraries to “protect young minds”.  Setting up a little free library at the edge of her property, she then populates it with the sort of wholesome content that she wants to promote.  Unbeknownst to her, however, those books are quickly replaced by the banned books, hidden in the approved book jackets to mask their true contents.  And that’s when the fun starts.

What follows is almost a series of vignettes as we see the residents of Troy taking a book and being changed for the better by the experience.  We all know that reading promotes empathy and expands our horizons, and that’s one of the key messages in this novel.  Is it a little over-simplified?  Yes, of course.  Take the boy whose brother has just come out, causing discord in their highly religious family.  He just happens to find a book that essentially shows his brother won’t go straight to hell because of his sexual orientation and that there’s nothing wrong with being gay.  It’s like that for everyone – they just happen to find the book that they need at that particular time in a way that’s just a little too convenient.  Does this matter?  Not in the slightest.  What we see is a community that becomes incrementally more tolerant, caring, and happier as a result of the small shifts in mindset that these books provoke, and it’s a joy to see. 

I liked the exploration of the titular Lula Dean who despite being the antagonist of the novel is perhaps the character that’s explored in most depth.  Not that there is a lot of depth to her, but I felt that I understood her more than most of the characters in the novel.  Lula is essentially desirous of attention and isn’t at all fussy as to how she gets it.  She doesn’t actually care about books and their contents, nor the impact that they have on impressionable young minds.  She doesn’t even know what most of the books she’s banned are about.  She just wants a platform, something to make her special, and after a few false attempts, she finds it through censorship of the books available in the community.  It makes her actions all the more infuriating given that she doesn’t actually care deep down, it’s simply a means to an end.

While Lula Dean may not have much depth, the novel does.  There’s a second plotline running behind the book banning and swapping which looks at the history of this community, and in particular the town’s Confederate “hero”, immortalised by a statue in the town square.  There are, quite rightly, some who are ashamed of that individual’s history and would like to see the statue replaced, while others see him as a hero, blaming the times rather than the man for his actions.  You can guess which side Lula Dean is on, I’m sure.  It’s a second element to the novel that makes it an extremely topical read, and I think addresses one of the arguments against iconoclasm – there are other ways of marking history without celebrating terrible people.

Populated with many memorable characters, Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books is a quirky read about the power of books to broaden our minds, but also about the ability we have to stand up for what we believe in in a world that’s becoming increasingly polarised.  I loved it.