The Best Book I’ve Read About Book Bans is a Comedy
A review of Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller (William Morrow, 2024)
I did not expect to laugh every now and then while reading a novel about censorship. I expected to be tired. I've spent enough time hearing about school board agendas, district policies, and social media conversations that start with "so a parent emailed about a book" to know that this topic usually arrives with a headache attached.
Then I read Kirsten Miller's Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books, and I finished it in about three sittings, mostly because I kept wanting to know what the next person in town was going to accidentally read.
Here's the setup, and it's a good one.
Lula Dean lives in the small town of Troy, Georgia. She has made herself a local celebrity by crusading to get "inappropriate" books pulled from the public library - none of which, notably, she has actually read. To replace all that filth she's so proud of removing, she builds a charming little free library in her front yard and stocks it with wholesome, unobjectionable titles.
What Lula doesn't know is that a local teenager has quietly swapped the guts of every book in that hutch. The dust jackets are still Lula's approved covers. The pages inside are the banned ones. Anne Frank is hiding inside a perky travel story. Toni Morrison is in there. So are the gay romances, the Black history, the Judy Blume, and a spell book or two.
And then the town starts reading.
Why it works:
The novel is structured as a series of interlocking chapters, each following a different resident of Troy who wanders up to that little library, grabs something that looks safe, and gets something else entirely. A football player. A postal carrier. A wife who has spent a lifetime being agreeable. Each chapter is titled after a book, and each one is a small, self-contained story about what happens when a person meets a narrative they were never supposed to encounter.
It's funny in the specific way that Southern satire is funny — affectionate and merciless at the same time. Miller clearly loves these people even as she skewers them, and the town's buried history (Confederate monuments, a few things nobody wants excavated) gives the comedy real weight underneath.
But what kept pulling me back to my own work was this: the entire novel is a 300-page dramatization of Rudine Sims Bishop's mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Every single chapter is somebody encountering a window and being changed by the view. Miller never says it in that language. She doesn't have to. She just shows you, over and over, a person who cannot un-see what they've read.
Three things I keep thinking about as a teacher educator:
1. Lula hasn't read the books. This is the joke at the center of the novel, and it's not really a joke. In my experience, the strongest position an educator can hold in a challenge conversation is simply I have read this book, and here is why it's in my classroom. Miller's satire lands because the reverse is so common. Knowing your own classroom library is a professional practice.
2. The transformation happens in private. Nobody in Troy is argued into anything; no one wins a debate. People change alone, in a chair, holding a book. That felt like a helpful corrective for those of us who sometimes think of culturally sustaining work as primarily a matter of public advocacy. The reason it matters is that it protects the quiet, solitary, unobserved encounter between a kid and a story.
3. Silence is a position. Several characters in this book spend years thinking of themselves as neutral, and Miller has very little patience for that. She keeps asking what the cost of comfortable quiet has been — for the town, and for the people the town has decided not to see. Anyone who has ever thought "I just want to teach reading, I don't want to be political" will find something uncomfortable and useful here.
The honest caveats:
This is satire, so it moves at satire speed. People change fast. A few plot turns are tidier than life. If you want a slow, ambiguous literary novel about censorship, this isn't it - Miller is writing something closer to a comic morality tale, and she's not hiding it.
Also, and this matters for our audience: this is an adult novel. There's language, some sexual content, and a fair amount of racial violence in the town's history. It's a terrific book club pick…maybe for a group of teachers. It is not a read-aloud.
Who I'd hand it to:
Pre-service teachers who are about to walk into a school where these fights are already happening and who have never been asked what they'd say.
In-service teachers who are tired and could use a book about this that doesn't feel like homework.
Any book club that wants a discussion with actual heat in it. Three questions to start: Which character did you most want to defend? Which one made you uncomfortable because you recognized yourself? What's the book you'd smuggle into Lula's hutch?