Banned books and antisemitism

 

 

I’ve just finished reading Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books. This is set in the present in day in a fictionalised Troy in Georgia. Lula Dean comes across as a slightly strange character. She organises a group of concerned parents to take books out of the town library This includes The Diary of Anne Frank, a generally well-respected book.  Is it perhaps because it’s the diary of a young girl who is beginning to understand her own sexuality? Lula then builds a ‘little library’ in front of her own home. She fills it with what she considers ‘wholesome’ books.

The daughter of her rival replaces the books; she puts different books inside the dust-covers of the books Lula has chosen.

It seemed to be rather exaggerated but I did read today that To Kill a Mockingbird has been removed from the school curriculum because readers might find it disturbing. Er, isn’t that rather the point?

It turns out  in Lula’s case it wasn’t so much to do with her concern for the welfare of  the local youth but it was all part of a long-standing rivalry with another more reasonable member of the local community.

How often do people seek to rise to power because of some personal issue? Even Hitler had his poor childhood as a motivator.

There are Neo-nazis and anti-Semites in the town and some of the books that Lula wants removed challenge Nazism, anti-Semitinsm, trans and homophobia and support feminism.  The books that replace the banned books are in fact more wholesome.

We find out that Lula hasn’t even read the books but picked them up form a charity shop. We also find out that in her earlier life she hadn’t been averse to reading some quite raunchy texts.

I was a little disappointed with the book though I found its message important. There were just too many characters and too many paragraphs longer than a page, both of which made it difficult to read.

However, we see the townspeople enriched by reading the replacement books and then find the courage and the incentive to get this community back on track.

Lula leaves town and her house is sold but everyone wants to keep her little library now restocked with quality literature.      

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