Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books, by Kirsten Miller (Goodreads Author)

 

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This novel portrays a small southern town as a microcosm representation of the nation with all the political polarization and hot issues concentrated within the confines of the local community. The main plot is structured around the issue of banned books with the president of the school board, Beverly Underwood, opposed to book bans versus the community's leading advocate for banning books, Lula Dean. These two individuals are both running for mayor which has made the issue of book banning the main polarizing issue in local politics. However, that issue is proxy for a host of other issues that divide the community between conservative versus liberal on such issues as LGBTQ+ acceptance, gun control, women’s rights, fake news, and numerous small-town secrets and personal conflicts.

At the beginning of the book we learn that many books have already been removed from the school and city libraries by Lula’s concern citizens committee. Lula has erected a small free library in her front yard with a collection of what she considers to be wholesome books. In the opening chapter Beverly’s daughter and a friend secretly remove those books from the little free library, they remove the dust jackets off those books, then they placed the dust jackets over the “banned” books, and then they put those banned books with the wrong covers into the little free library. As the story’s plot proceeds a number of the town’s residents take books from the free library, ending up not with the intended books, but nevertheless being helped or enlightened in unexpected ways.

Each chapter of the novel bears the title of a well-known book or a fictional title invented by the author to represent a genre of books. While these chapter titles are not explicitly mentioned within the story, the names themselves ofter an ironic commentary on the content that follows each one.

This book is filled with a host of characters from the community all interacting through various relationships. It all makes for a story filled with ironic humor but with a message--it's sort of a political melodrama. The personality characteristics involved seem unrealistically exaggerated, but I'm afraid that such extremes probably do exist, it's just that it's unusual to have such multiple extremes within a small community. But of course the extremes play well for ironic humor.

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