Bookworm in the City

No. 10 : A book published this year
Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books / Kirsten Miller

If you like a book that is funny, smart, and on point.
If you have a problem with the idea of banning books.
Then you should read: Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books.

This book is about all things ugly: racism. Slavery. Sexism. Homophobia. Misogynism. Entitlement. Nazis. Book banning. Bullying. Fake news.
None of that sounds like this would be a fun read, but thanks to some clever writing it truly is.

Troy, Georgia, is a place that unfortunately is easy to “see” through the book. It’s pretty at first glance, but the longer you look, the more you realize that it’s just a filter covering up a bad picture.
It’s the kind of place where local busy-body Lula Dean makes sure that half the library collection gets banned. What to do with all the banned books? Wasteful to let them take up space, so maybe best to just burn them.
This idea is only just stopped by Beverly, the head of the school board (and Lula’s archenemy) and the books instead are stored in her office under lock and key.
Lula might not have read any of the books, but she just knows that they corrupt youngsters, getting them hooked on drugs, turning them gay, and giving them un-American thoughts. In protest against the liberal books that the library has in its collection, she puts a Little Free Library in her front yard and fills it with solid, decent, reading materials such as Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Southern Belle’s Guide to Etiquette, and Nancy Drew. Books that will better the world and will help turn things back to the way they were: good and proper American.

Luckily, for every local bully there is a local rebel. And in a wonderful coup they switch out the books in Lula’s library for titles she has deemed inappropriate, but, they place them inside the dust jackets of the original books. So, when someone picks up Buffy Halliday Goes to Europe!, she actually reads the banned Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl.
One of the first chapters (which, by the way, are named after these book titles so all bonus points for that) had me laughing out loud on the train (an older lady bakes a cake). The chapter after that had me gasping and shaking my head in disbelief. This is the kind of book that does that to you.
The book is smartly written with almost every chapter having someone different in the limelight, providing different points of view on the same issues, while adding nuance and inside glances to some of them.
Little by little the town starts to stand up against everything that is wrong with it, bringing all that has been simmering and festering under the surface for years to light, and it made me cheer for them.

Censorship is awful. Book banning is awful. This book covers the ugly practice and a lot of other uncomfortable, painful, and serious, topics. And it does it with humor and alacrity.
At times there are characters that veered a bit towards caricatures or stereotypes, but it didn’t bother me because they did serve the story and got the message across.
The message: book banning makes no sense. And: libraries, big or small, are amazing.