Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books

by Kirsten Miller

To people in uniforms, trailer trash was still trash, no matter what shade their skin was.

“You know—that’s what really gets me. There are a million great Southerners who’d make a better statue than the one you’ve got.” “Who would you pick?” “From this state? Probably Little Richard—the Georgian who single-handedly invented rock and roll. Or maybe Brenda Lee? Alice Walker or Erskine Caldwell if you’re feeling fancy? André 3000? Whoever came up with the recipe for the fried chicken at Chester’s? The South’s greatest gift to the world is its culture. Half the music people listen to these days has its origins here. Hell, the South gave the world barbecue and you want to honor a slaveholding asshole who lost a war in the middle of the nineteenth century?

His gut was screaming louder than ever that something was wrong. It was the same gut that had kept Delvin alive in Afghanistan, and he’d learned to listen when it spoke to him. The first thing it had taught him was the most lethal creatures on earth were young men with a few bad ideas and nothing to lose.

Since the town’s newspaper had gone belly up three years earlier, Facebook was Troy’s sole source of local news—if that’s what you wanted to call the gossip, hearsay, wild speculation, conspiracy theories, and general insanity that Jonathan’s neighbors tossed with their fact salads. You had to know a person’s political leanings, astrological signs, and pharmaceutical history if you wanted to interpret their “news” correctly.

But like everyone in Troy, he was hooked. Feeling like a junkie, Jonathan refreshed his feed.

She’d always assumed most people saw things the way she did. Her father used to say they belonged to a “silent majority” that represented the best of America. Now Melody was beginning to wonder if there might be a much bigger group who’d been holding their tongues—people who minded their own business until push came to shove. It was starting to look like the book-banning business may have shoved them a step too far.

“I think of every bouquet as a little story,” Betsy told her, “and stories are the most powerful things in this world. They can mend broken hearts, bring back good memories, and make people fall in love.” “Or convince them to do the right thing,” Nahla added.

*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