Kirsten Miller

Fiction 2024| 296 pages

Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books is quirky. Perhaps implausible.  One-third of the way into this book, I read some reviews. Two reviewers describe this book as hilarious satire.  I missed this completely..  I found it very choppy and disjointed. Plus, there are 24 characters, making it challenging to follow.  I do not read humor in it at all. I did not giggle once.  

Beverly Underwood and her arch enemy, Lula Dean, live in the tiny town of Troy, Georgia, where they were born and raised. Beverly is on the school board, and Lula has become a local celebrity by embarking on a 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.  But she has not read any of them.

But Beverly’s daughter Lindsay sneaks in by night and secretly fills Lula Dean’s little free library with banned books wrapped in “wholesome” dust jackets. The Girl’s Guide to the Revolution is wrapped in the cover of The Southern Belle’s Guide to Etiquette. A jacket that belongs to Our Confederate Heroes ends up on Beloved. 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. It’s a diverse and surprising bunch — including the local postman, the prom queen, housewives, a farmer, and the former DA — all of whom have been changed by what they’ve read. When Lindsay is forced to own up to what she’s done, the showdown that’s been brewing between Beverly and Lula will roil the whole town and change it forever.  

The second half of the plot really centers around a statue of Augustus Wainwright in the town square (in front of a town landmark.  Through a series of events, especially among the young people in town, people discover that Augustus, a slaveholder in his day, is Beverly’s great great great great great (four?) grandfather, which begins to explain why there are so many Blacks living in this southern bastion.

I cannot recommend Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books. It us not terribly well-written and is simply a rather bizarre story.

July 2026