58 pages • 1 hour read
Kirsten MillerLula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Information Wars
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of violence, suicide, sexual assault, enslavement, physical and emotional abuse, antisemitism, anti-LGBTQ+ bias, and murder.
Information of all kinds circulates through the little town of Troy. Cable news networks, Facebook posts, library books, rumors, and gossip all constitute sources of information that the community consumes. As the novel indicates, not all these sources are trustworthy, and all are competing for the minds and hearts of the town’s residents to promote a specific agenda. If knowledge is power, those who dispense or withhold information can control the town.
Lula is the most obvious example of someone who exploits disinformation to gain power. She was adept at this tactic long before she began banning books. When Lula wanted the final cheerleading slot on the varsity team in high school, she tried to turn Beverly against Darlene. Darlene was raped while intoxicated at a party in high school, and Lula implied that this was Darlene’s fault. Beverly immediately saw through Lula’s ploy and rejected it. This incident constitutes the beginning of their enmity toward one another. Decades later, Lula will once again try to distort information to sway opinion in Troy. She will play on the fears of the populace that their children are being groomed by LGBTQ+ people and that liberal books are making this transformation possible. Bella is quick to recognize Lula’s tactic. She tells Elijah, “Using fear to control people is about as old as time” (61).
While Lula uses this ploy to control one small town, mass media has already primed the minds of its citizens to accept her outrageous lies. Conservative news stations bombard residents with the perception that big cities are riddled with crime and debauchery. Keith Kelly’s parents are a prime example of people afraid to leave the safety of their own homes believing that murder and mayhem abound. Keith says of them, “The minute his parents got up in the morning, the news came on—and it didn’t go off until the two older Kellys went to bed around ten. He felt like he’d wandered into a war zone. The territory in dispute was his brain” (166).
The Kelly parents themselves come to realize the extent to which the news media distorts the facts after they are interviewed for the Wright-Wainwright family reunion. They see their neighbors having a good time together, and it warms their hearts. However, the edited version of their interview paints a much darker picture. After watching the broadcast that night, Ken Kelly asks his wife, “‘What the hell just happened?’ […] ‘I don’t know, Papa,’ Kari told him. ‘But I think we’re fake news’” (267). The novel suggests that the Lula Deans of the world gain power by leveraging the disinformation that mass media has primed their frightened audience to accept.
Protecting Southern Small-Town Secrets
Southern honor culture has roots in the feudal system of Europe in which social hierarchy governs status within the community. Consequently, keeping up the appearance of respectability matters far more than genuine virtue. As an offshoot of this principle, the South also defended its participation in the Civil War by perpetuating the Lost Cause myth. The narrative mentions this concept at several points. The Lost Cause frames the Civil War as a fight between godless, money-grubbing Yankees and god-fearing, virtuous Southerners who made a valiant effort to preserve their agrarian way of life. In other words, Confederate soldiers were perceived as honorable and worthy of respect, while their enemies were not. This ideology still carries weight in small Southern towns where reputations live or die based on community perceptions.
Because of the need to create the illusion of propriety, many of the citizens of Troy must keep secrets, and suppressing the truth becomes a full-time job. Lula Dean is a prime example of someone who promotes small-town virtues that have nothing to do with her own life experience. She condemns pornographic books yet has a secret collection of erotic romance novels. She abhors anyone who isn’t straight or cisgender and warns her fellow citizens that their children are being groomed by LGBTQ+ people. Lula’s hatred of free gender expression extends to her own children, who produce a drag show in Atlanta.
Other examples of suppressed secrets include Randy Sykes’s rape of Darlene Cagle in high school. The entire town knew about this, but nobody told Melody Sykes until decades later. Nathan Dugan is building a neo-Nazi organization that holds secret meetings in his basement. His wife ends this covert activity by displaying Nathan’s Nazi paraphernalia on their front lawn for the neighbors to see. The abuse Logan Walsh experienced as a child is another example of dangerously suppressed secrets. His abusive father damaged him emotionally and harmed his mother physically, but the judge was a pillar of the community, and his atrocities went unchallenged until his son killed him, passing it off as a hunting accident.
The best example of protected secrets is the glorification of Augustus Wainwright as a Confederate hero when he was actually a serial rapist and owner of enslaved Black people. Augustus’s descendants recognize the pernicious consequences of a small-town culture based on secrets and hypocrisy. They succeed in breaking this cycle of glorification of violence by bringing that which was hidden out into the open. Beverly says, “This town has been hiding too much for too long. Secrets are a disease that eats away at your soul. My grandmother always said the best disinfectant is sunlight” (202).
The Transformative Power of Books
The book’s central theme of the transformative power of books relates to the theme of protecting secrets. Lula and her supporters seek to preserve the illusion of the South’s glorious past. To do so, they must suppress any inconvenient facts that contradict the myth and keep these from influencing the minds of the citizens. Although such actions relate to the broader issue of censorship in general, Lula aspires to local power and seeks to control local sources of information. This access is found within the pages of books she can directly ban or approve. The novel uses the satiric technique of pairing Lula’s approved books with their banned counterparts. Although this comparison is rarely explicitly made in the text, Miller offers subtext aimed to help distinguish between books that have negative effects and those that have positive or illuminating power.
The Southern Belle’s Guide to Etiquette, presumably meant to create well-behaved young ladies, is paired with The Girl’s Guide to the Revolution. After reading the latter, Bella stages a protest at school over the restrictive dress code that applies to girls but not to boys. In a chapter entitled “101 Cakes to Bake for Your Family,” Wilma creates a monumental cake designed to resemble male genitalia. It is an engineering marvel intended to prove that she is in full possession of her mental faculties. Delvin picks up a copy of Our Confederate Heroes, expecting to have his own Black history expunged, and instead finds a copy of Toni Morrison’s Beloved that recounts the violent legacy of enslavement. This find inspires him to add to Lula’s library by planting more banned books inside the dust jackets of her approved titles. When Crystal Moore picks up a copy of The Rules, hoping to win back her cheating husband, she finds a book on witchcraft instead that inspires her to take back her power.
In every instance, the banned titles offer a way forward for people in the community. Lula brands all such books as dangerous, and she is right in assessing them as such. Information within the books redirects the community’s interests away from the past and toward the future to disrupt the restrictive, prejudiced status quo that Lula wants to preserve. At the end of the novel, Beverly realizes the real value of Lindsey’s prank: “The books she’d put in that library had opened eyes, granted courage, and exposed terrible crimes. That’s why they were dangerous—why so many people had wanted to hide them” (282). In the end, Lula ultimately realizes that she must abandon her attempts to control the minds of Troy citizens by restricting access to books and relocates to Atlanta to live with her children.
