by Kirsten Miller, 2024
This is the first selection for the Old Town Library Book Club for 2025-2026, and the Fort Collins Reads Headliner for 2025. It was an easy read, about a fictional southern town, Troy, Georgia, filled with good people and bad people. One of the bad people is Lula Dean, an ignorant, petty, jealous, hypocritical, self-righteous, bitter white woman, who decides heads up the Concerned Parent Committee and bans a bunch of books. She then puts up a little free library in her front yard full of mostly putrid books, like The Southern Belle’s Guide to Etiquette, Buffy Halliday Goes to Europe!, 101 Cakes to Bake for Your Family, Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Art of the Deal, Manhood, Our Confederate Heroes, The Art of Crochet, Contract with America, A Caledonian Fling, The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right. (Some of those books are made-up.) The lesbian daughter, Lindsay, of one of the towns most respected woman, Beverly Underwood, switches out the books with banned books, leaving the covers intact. As the town takes books from Lula Dean’s Little Free Library, they become educated to their own prejudices and self-righteousness. Some of the books she puts inside the jackets are banned books and some are made up: All Women are Witches: Find Your Power and Put It to Use, Beloved, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, The Hemingses of Monticello, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Gender Queer, Humankind.
Every type of ignorance in America today is reflected in many of the people living in this town. There are Nazis, the ugliest type of ignorance–murderous, evil racists. There are those who believe women are meant to serve. Those who believe the Confederates were heroes. Those who believe our slavery was a kind of benevolence towards black people. Those who are anti-gay and afraid. Those who have been brainwashed by media. They are self-righteous, hypocritical, judgmental, holier than thou, ignorant. The good guys are educated, open-minded, sane; some are queer, one becomes a witch (goddess), and some are just regular folks. Lots and lots of characters.
In the end, the Nazis are either dead or run off in shame. The ones who had prejudices and were swayed by misinformation become educated and more open-minded. Because of DNA testing, the town discovers many of the black people are descendants of the horrible cowardly rapist, Augustus Wainwright, and his statue is pulled down.
All of the good changes happen because of the banned books the town reads that were hidden in Lula Dean’s Little Free Library.
Here’s a list of the banned books Kirsten Miller recommends: “Those with an asterisk have been banned in parts of the United States. You’ll find no pornography. No Communist propaganda. Just the truth.”
*Beloved by Toni Morrison
*Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
*Maus by Art Spiegelman
The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed
How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith
*Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
*Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
*All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson
*Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
All That She Carried by Tiya Miles
*The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
*Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
Battling the Big Lie by Dan Pfeiffer
Humankind by Rutger Bregman
I liked this book, but she goes too far for me. She presents things like butt plugs, tripping on mushrooms, pornography on the internet, witchcraft, as nothing to be concerned about, and that books cannot make people one way or another, but the whole premise of the book is that books can change people. I agree that books and education can change minds and hearts that have been misinformed, and I pray for that.
She dedicates the book, “For all the good people down south.” In A Note from the Author, at the end of the book, she writes about growing up in a small town in rural North Carolina, with parents who taught their children the truth. She says, “But I want to make it clear that the issues addressed in this novel–book banning, white nationalism, anti-Semitism, etc.–are by no means unique to the South. These are American problems. Pretending they only occur in the South has allowed them to flourish unchecked elsewhere in the United States….Contrary to popular belief, the rural South is home to countless principled, well-informed people. But I also knew kids who were far less fortunate. Some simply had no access to the truth and grew up in a vacuum that would eventually be filled with disinformation and conspiracies. A tiny but notable minority were fed a diet of hatred and lies from an early age. My heart breaks for those kids. How can you come to know what’s right when all the information you’re ever given is wrong?”
While reading this book, Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah, by a 22 year-old Utahan who was raised in Saint George by Republican parents. The lies and disinformation abound on both sides of the aisle. God help us! Have mercy on us! We’ve let Satan rule in our hearts and minds and he has used abortion and homosexuality to divide us as a nation, move us far from You, where hatred and evil rule, instead of Your love and grace. God have mercy on us. Only You can truly change hearts and minds. Come, Lord Jesus, Come! Amen.
This Blood and Soil is a book one of the main characters, Beverly Underwood, read when she was a child, that educated her to the truth of slavery in America.
When Betsy Wright, a sweet mother, owner of a successful flower shop, who had to fight racism against her all of her life, finds out her son, Isaac, is gay, it devastates her. She is talking to the friendly postman and he is praising Isaac. She says, “You know he’s gay, don’t you?” He acts like that’s nothing. She tells him, “The pastor says Isaac’s soul is in jeopardy.” “The Bible says men lying with men is an abomination.” He replies, “The Bible’s got about a million words and that’s the only quote people can ever come up with to prove God frowns on gay folks. It’s from the Old Testament, which also says pigs are unclean and shouldn’t be touched. I don’t recall the pastor turning his nose up at any barbecue.”