Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books Published by HarperCollins on June 18, 2024 Genres: Fiction / Friendship, Fiction / Satire, Fiction / Small Town & Rural, Fiction / Southern, Fiction / Women
Pages: 304
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Goodreads
“Kirsten Miller has that rare ability to take a serious subject and make it very, very funny. I enjoyed this novel and you will too.”--James Patterson
The provocative and hilarious summer read that will have book lovers cheering and everyone talking! Kirsten Miller, author of The Change, brings us a bracing, wildly entertaining satire about a small Southern town, a pitched battle over banned books, and a little lending library that changes everything.
Beverly Underwood and her arch enemy, Lula Dean, live in the tiny town of Troy, Georgia, where they were born and raised. Now Beverly is on the school board, and Lula has become a local celebrity by embarking on mission to rid the public libraries of all inappropriate books—none of which she’s actually read. To replace the “pornographic” books she’s challenged at the local public library, Lula starts her own lending library in front of her home: a cute wooden hutch with glass doors and neat rows of the worthy literature that she’s sure the town’s readers need.
What Lula doesn’t know is that a local troublemaker has stolen her wholesome books, removed their dust jackets, and restocked Lula’s library with banned books: literary classics, gay romances, Black history, witchy spell books, Judy Blume novels, and more. One by one, neighbors who borrow books from Lula Dean’s library find their lives changed in unexpected ways. Finally, one of Lula Dean’s enemies discovers the library and decides to turn the tables on her, just as Lula and Beverly are running against each other to replace the town’s disgraced mayor.
That’s when all the townspeople who’ve been borrowing from Lula’s library begin to reveal themselves. That's when the showdown that’s been brewing between Beverly and Lula will roil the whole town...and change it forever.
Review:
I laughed, I cried, and thoroughly enjoyed every single page of this deliciously mischievous, truth-telling, heart-warming story. While the subject of book-banning is a serious matter, the author strikes the perfect balance of using humor as well as rich and powerful storytelling to lift up the negative consequences of doing so, of whose voices are squelched, who doesn’t get to see themselves in history or literature to know that they can be better than their stereotypes or their ancestors, or find commonality, respect and compassion for others’. And, conversely, the positive outcomes that can come from opening someone’s heart or mind through reading.
Yes, it makes a mockery of Lula Dean, a caricature of a town busybody who is trying to fill a whole in her heart with attention, drama and power and seizes on book-banning as a vehicle for that. But through each character’s story, even Lula’s, the author illustrates how books don’t hurt people – people hurt people. Books do, however, give people access to new ideas as well as historical truths, a wide array of perspectives, belief systems and role models to choose from in finding their own moral compass, live their best lives, and heal old wounds and relationships.
About Kirsten Miller
Kirsten Miller grew up in a small town in the mountains of North Carolina. At seventeen, she left for college in New York City, where she lives to this day. Kirsten’s latest novel, Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books, is a side-splitting satire that takes on some of the most controversial issues of our day. Her first adult novel, The Change, was a Good Morning America Book Club pick for May 2022. Kirsten is also the author of over a dozen middle grade and YA novels, including the acclaimed Kiki Strike books, (which tell the tale of the delinquent girl geniuses who keep Manhattan safe), and How to Lead a Life of Crime. She is not the Kirsten Miller who wrote All That Is Left, but she assumes that Kirsten is lovely and talented.
So this author wrote one of my favorite YA series, that I still need to finish I think, and so I was intrigued by this one. Sounds like it could be a fun read.