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.