The following is part of my post for this week over at “Be a Cactus” on Substack. Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books is not a YA book. However, it does have some teen characters, one of whom incites the action of the book. Since it’s about a topic near and dear to librarians and readers alike, I thought I’d add it here.

Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books 

A few weeks back I found Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books. I don’t know where I saw this—it wasn’t a review. I knew nothing about the novel, but I bought it just for the topic. Reading it, I realized it was very different from what I’m trying to do in writing about book bans. When I read the publisher’s blurbs, I found that it’s advertised as a hilarious summer read. 

The novel is set in the present day in the small town of Troy, Georgia which is full of racism and has a statue of one of the town’s principal men, Augustus Wainwright, a Confederate Army general who owned a plantation and accumulated wealth on the backs of enslaved people. A few Gen X women have a longstanding feud based on their oppositional worldviews. One of them is Lula Dean, whose argument with the world is that she isn’t getting the attention she deserves. Decades after she was cut from the cheerleading squad in favor of a girl who was raped at a party while drunk (thus, Lula thinks the girl is a whore and not worthy of representing the squad), Lula still holds a grudge. 

Lula finds that she can get the attention she craves through challenging books in the public library. Books are removed from the library but kept in storage while the battle is active. The argument is one based on the reality of book bans: the book banners feel young people shouldn’t be exposed to books with sensitive topics as they say these aren’t age appropriate. Lula goes even further suggesting that no one should have these books available. So nothing about queer people (specifically gay and transgender here), nothing about human bodies or their functions, nothing about violent crimes like rape, and nothing factual about history that makes (White) people feel bad. 

In a fit of self-righteousness, Lula decides to place a little free library in her yard. She purchases discarded books from a charity shop very cheaply. These are not titles anyone is interested in, things about how Southern ladies should conduct themselves and the like. Out of date and out of touch—like Lula.

Major spoilers ahead

Early on, a college-aged woman, the daughter of one of Lula’s ‘enemies,’ replaces all the books in the little library with some of the books that were removed from the public library. She leaves the original book jackets on the replacement books. So now instead of books on Southern life or decor, there are books like Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and The Diary of Anne Frank as well as a spell-casting instructional, books on gay romance, etc. 

Being who I am—a librarian with practical experience in processing books—when I read this, the first thing I thought was: how fortunate that all the books were hardcovers with book jackets and that all the replacement books were exactly the same size. (I’m guessing no one but a librarian would pause over this.) That bothered me until I read further and realized the novel isn’t supposed to be realistic. It aims to have a crisis and an ending much like the final fun in The Maid—everything works out splendidly in the present for the good guys and they will go on to have fabulous futures. The bad guys get their comeuppance. Its goal is to poke fun at a certain element of society. 

When I finished Lula Dean, I found it to be very much a morality play. The characters each represent one dimension or characteristic. There is the sexual predator town mayor, the innocent man who’s been criminalized, the activist college student, etc. Lula herself is a villain.

Book lessons

When the townspeople pick up books from Lula’s little library, each happens upon the perfect book to change their life. It seems no one knows anything about any of the books. (Did no one ever check any of them out of the public library while they were there on the shelves?) This gives the author the opportunity to tell her readers about each book and why it matters. Still, it makes most of the townspeople look pretty ignorant. That there is a woman whose husband is a White supremacist and who doesn’t understand the meaning of the flags he has around the house feels implausible. That she doesn’t know anything about Anne Frank before reading her diary is truly strange. The fact that she missed the last semester of high school because she was pregnant is meant to account for this. 

Some variation of the above scenario repeats with multiple books. For each of these books, we receive a summary lesson about that book (e.g., Are You There, God? = a young boy learns that menstrual periods exist, they are normal, most women have them at some point, and that’s why his mom has those large cotton pads in her bathroom cabinet).

Lula the loser

Ultimately Lula loses her battle to ban books. She is publicly humiliated and proven to be a hypocrite whose own taste in reading materials tends to pornography. (To be clear, there’s no pornography in this book. It’s a fun read for teens as well as adults.) And once she loses, all the good guys win big, transforming their town, removing the Confederate statue, and setting racial relationships on a better path.

So, yes, it’s a feel-good read with an abundance of joy at the end. Which, I believe is the mission of the book—to spread joy and teach a bit about some iconic titles in the process. It achieves its goal.