Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books

Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books (2024) is the second adult novel by New York Times best-selling author Kirsten Miller. Miller is best known for her middle grade and young adult fiction, most notably the Kiki Strike series. Her debut adult novel, The Change (2022), became a Good Morning America Book Club pick. Miller shares a similar background to the characters in her most recent novel, having been raised in a small town in North Carolina. Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books falls under the categories of censorship, politics, and satire fiction. As Lula Dean tries to ban books within a small Southern community, the novel explores the themes of The Information Wars, Protecting Southern Small-Town Secrets, and The Transformative Power of Books.

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 offer an ironic commentary on the content that follows each one. Consequently, the summaries below will each begin with an explanation of the chapter’s title.

This study guide references the HarperCollins 2024 e-book edition.

Content Warning: The novel includes discussions of violence, suicide, sexual assault, enslavement, physical and emotional abuse, antisemitism, anti-LGBTQ+ bias, and murder.

Plot Summary

The story unfolds in the fictional small town of Troy, Georgia, during the spring and early summer of 2024. Each chapter uses a limited third-person narrative technique, but the narrators themselves vary, with more than a dozen different characters describing their lives and their reactions to Lula Dean’s book ban. Because reading material is central to the story, each chapter borrows its title from an existing book or genre of books, but Miller uses the titles ironically to contrast with each chapter’s content.

As the novel begins, Lula Dean has already succeeded in banning books from the town library that she deems improper. She has gained the support of the community by playing on parental fears that their children might “turn gay” from reading about LGBTQ+ individuals. School board director Beverly Underwood opposes Lula, but Beverly is fighting a losing battle. She keeps the banned books in her basement, hopeful that someday they can return to the town’s library shelves. In the meantime, Lula has set up a little wooden box on a post in front of her house and called it “Lula’s Little Library.” She stocks it with books that she considers tasteful.

Late one night, Beverly’s daughter, Lindsey, comes home from college and decides to play a prank. She removes Lula’s books and uses their dust jackets to disguise the banned books from her mother’s basement. Unwittingly, people borrow volumes from the little library but end up reading banned books that have a profound effect on their behavior. For instance, the subservient wife of a neo-Nazi reads a copy of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. When her son vandalizes the house of her Jewish friend, she realizes that she must act. Before leaving town with her son for good, she stacks her husband’s Nazi paraphernalia on the front lawn for her neighbors to see. Another wife who learns that her husband is cheating borrows a copy of The Rules to get him back. Instead, she reads a book on witchcraft and takes back her personal power. Then, she divorces her spouse. The town’s Black mailman grows upset by Troy’s racist past and Lula’s censorship. He takes Our Confederate Heroes from the little library, intending to destroy it, but finds Toni Morrison’s Beloved instead. Knowing that someone is subverting Lula’s mission to clean up the town, he decides to help by planting some controversial titles of his own in the little library.

As tensions escalate between those who back Lula’s censorship and those who favor free speech as Beverly champions, both women decide to run for mayor. Lula plans to stage the announcement of her candidacy in front of the Confederate statue of General Augustus Wainwright to reinforce her commitment to Southern traditions and values. Meanwhile, Beverly and a gay Black teen named Isaac both have their DNA tested and realize that they share the Wainwright bloodline. Knowing that Augustus Wainwright not only enslaved Black people but also raped dozens of them, Beverly and Isaac demand that the statue be taken down. To further complicate matters, Lula has garnered the support of Logan Walsh, another neo-Nazi, who plans to massacre the dissidents in town. The list of people who oppose Lula grows larger every time somebody stumbles across another banned volume that gives them progressive ideas.

Logan’s planned massacre is discovered in time, and he dies by suicide, but this doesn’t stop Lula’s self-righteous crusade. She tries to have Beverly arrested for planting banned books in her library. The battle between Beverly and Lula escalates until Lula’s twin children return to town to expose their mother’s hypocrisy. The twins are well-known drag performers in Atlanta, and they alert everyone to their mother’s secret stash of erotic romance novels. Too humiliated to continue her crusade, Lula leaves town to live with her children. In Troy, Beverly and Isaac stage a family reunion that draws hundreds of cousins, Black and white, from around the region. In the aftermath of Lula’s reign of terror, the Confederate statue is removed, and Troy becomes a much more literate, tolerant, and welcoming place to live.