Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books

by Kirsten Miller

“Do I look like a person who’d read this kind of smut?” Lula asked, holding up a copy of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

Um

The hatred hung in the air like a virus.

“Yeah, well, don’t give her too much credit. She didn’t invent it. Using fear to control people is about as old as time.”

The worst thing you could do as

parent, she thought, was to shield young women from the ugliness of the world—then blame them when they did not see it coming.

Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret.

Absolute icon

My father won. You can call me Hank.”