Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books, by Kirsten Miller

This has been one of my favorite reads of the year. It’s entertaining, relevant, and easy to read with laugh out loud pithy statements on today’s hot topics. Yet it shows real world consequences with the events happening in our society today. 

Lula Dean and Beverly Underwood have been rivals in Lula Dean’s mind since the high school cheerleading squad separated the girls. Living in Troy, Alabama, the women are now wives and mothers, with Beverly being the School Board President and Lula Dean living in her pink house with unrequited dreams of being a force in the community. 

Pornography was found in the baking section of the local library. It didn’t matter that the book on erotic cake decorating had been slipped into the shelves by a 13 year old prankster, but with this Lula Dean has found her calling! The children of Troy are in peril! Getting together with a group of like minded citizens, Lula and her cohorts get right to work listing books that “no right minded Christian would allow the precious children of this god fearing community to read.” Finding the same list online was proof that they had picked the right ones. 

The Concerned Parents Committee ransacked the high school, middle school, elementary and local libraries of these books. When the pictures of the confiscated books were shown on Facebook the question arose: What shall we do with these books? The answer came loud and clear–Burn them! 

An emergency community meeting the next night saw Beverly deciding that the school board would look into the matter of the books. Until a decision of how to handle the situation was reached, the books were to be stored in Beverly’s basement. 

The next morning an article about the books appears in the local paper with a picture of Lula standing next to a cabinet housing her library on her front lawn. Lula Dean’s Little Lending Library of wholesome books. 

Beverly’s daughter, Lindsay, who is gay and just heading off to her first year of college, is terribly unhappy with the situation, feeling that her mother should have handled the whole thing better. 

In the dark of night, the books in Lula’s library are switched from “wholesome” to banned with the bookcovers hiding the real titles. These books of literary classics, Black history, gay romance, Judy Blume novels and books of “witchy spells” replace Lula’s books of “The Southern Bell’s Guide to Ediquett”, “101 Cakes to Bake for your Family”, and “The Art of the Deal”. 

This sets off unexpected and unsettling events with the inhabitants of the town as they access the lending library. Lindsay, by changing the books, has kicked over a rock that had been long undisturbed-–exposing unsavory creatures living below to crawl out from under. “Nazis, rapists, and murderers, not to mention hypocritics and opportunists”– crawl out and are exposed to the community. 

A suicide of one the town’s most challenging inhabitants unearths a manifesto detailing a would be massacre on the of the people of Troy. A local Confederate general’s statue in front of the City Hall comes tumbling down as the descendants rebel against the false told tale of his honor and glory. 

All comes to a satisfying ending for Lula Dean. 

Our book club, as we like to do, discussed the cover enjoying the color, the little library of books with the lit match giving us thoughts of the novel “Fahrenheit 451.” We were very satisfied and delighted when the book cover was removed. Discover for yourself this intriguing and relevant book. It does not disappoint. 

— Deb Krueger

Twelve Post-War Tales, by Graham Swift

Reading British author Graham Swift’s short stories in Twelve Post-War Tales is a little like eating a small bowl of dulce de leche ice cream. Each bite is rich and complex, leaving an intriguing after-taste, calling us to read and re-read. To savor each story.

A paradox of literary fiction is that its extreme specificity is what allows it to feel universal. I, for instance, have nothing in common with seventy-year-old Dermot, a Cork man from York, who banters in a pub with his mates on a rainy night about a sweet girl he once knew who worked in chocolate. Innuendo, wink-wink, laughter. But who among us can read the closing passage of the story “Chocolate,” without sighing Ah yes. I have felt that way. Surely everyone has felt that way. Thank God we can feel that way.

Everything had an inky sheen. On the strip of pavement, on the kerbstones and gutter, on the surface of the street and the droplet-covered bodywork of parked cars, the reflections from the streethlights shone and shimmered. From inside looking out, before you had to go back out into it, and with two pints inside you, it all had a way of even looking quite appealing.

Who can read “Hinges” without recognizing Annie’s grief, the pointless ubiquity of the best poems to read at a funeral, and the mother’s limp, unresponsive hand Annie tries to hold? Who hasn’t had bizarre memories pop up at such times, like the one Annie has as her dad’s funeral begins, of Joe Short, a man she “fancied” when she was little, who fixed a door she later realizes has similarities to the coffin in which her dad lies.

Who, of a certain age, hasn’t imagined losing their mind (and their memories) as Anna-Maria Anderson does on her eighty-second birthday in “Passport?” Swift treats this character—and all his characters—very tenderly, but uncompromisingly.

It was 6:30 a.m. Still dark. She sat, looking forward, braced and prepared, clutching the proof of her identity, but she was really somewhere else already and she knew, as well as she ever would, who she was. She sat and she waited. She waited. She waited for the light to flash.

Our group spent three weeks discussing these twelve tales, having our favorites and least favorites, but we agreed each story was, in its own way, a remarkable capture of what it means to be a human among humans. To grow older, to be formed by memory, to wait—knowing who we are—for the light to flash.

We equivocated a little over the title and cover since—together—they imply the stories will be about the aftermath to World War II, and that’s not true of all of them. But Swift touches on various other times of turmoil (the Cuban missile crisis, North Ireland, President Kennedy’s assassination, the riots of the sixties, the pandemic) as if to argue it’s always post-war somewhere, thus a tale may be told.

— Sharelle Moranville

Excellent Women, by Barbara Pym

The comic novel Excellent Women by Barbara Pym immerses the reader in a time long past, an unfamiliar country and a unique culture.  It’s 1952 post-World War II London. Rationing is still in effect and various structures, such as parts of churches, remain in ruins.  The male population has been much reduced by the war, and the female population appears to be divided into marriageable women  – young, attractive with the feminine wiles to know how to attract men and then the “excellent women ” – those who actually know how to run a household and address the common tasks of everyday life, women who are always open to serving others, regardless of how presumptuous the task or clueless the originator. The protagonist is one of the latter.

Excellent Women is a  comedy of social manners in the style of Jane Austen.  The plot, such as it is, is driven by a cast of fascinating characters whose personal foibles and everyday activities comprise the narrative. There is a great deal of tea drinking, going out to lunch and participating as helpful and productive members of an Anglican parish where jumble sales and Christmas bazaars require hours of planning, quibbling and execution. This placid, comforting way of life is disrupted  by a married couple representing and introducing a new social order and a conniving, marriage-seeking female.    

The book opens with the main character and narrator Mildred Lathbury, a thirty something single woman of just sufficient independent means, welcoming  new neighbors to the flat below hers in very much not the best part of London or the most desirable house, since she must share a bathroom with the new tenants, married couple Helena and Rockingham (Rocky) Napier.  The Napiers are totally outside the normal orbit of Mildred’s quiet, solitary life.  Rocky is a flamboyantly charming naval officer, and Helena is an anthropologist, currently focused on marital kinship mapping in some foreign clime with her fellow anthropologist Everard Bone, an acerbic and socially inept unmarried male. Helena is a drama queen and a domestic slob – quite a contrast to Mildred who is a fastidious housekeeper with a quiet social life and part time job aiding distressed gentlewomen – an occupation that remains a mystery to the reader. Everard seems to take an interest in Mildred though his invariably dismissive communication style motivates Mildred’s sacrifice for Lent  – trying to like him.

As the book progresses, Helena and Rocky split, dragging Mildred into writing letters between them and even arranging  furniture transfers for both these self-centered, presumptuous moderns.  But  – Mildred is one of those excellent women, always ready to step in and help sort out other people’s problems.

The book’s other main characters are Mildred’s good friends, brother and sister Julian and Winifred Mallory. He is the unmarried parish Vicar, and she, an excellent woman, runs his household. Winifred is given to wearing items from the parish’s jumble sales that Mildred describes as drab and unsuitable. She notes that Julian has some good features but is not so good looking that women are constantly after him, thereby implying that marriage with him does not interest her. The siblings’ current preoccupation is finding a renter for the rectory’s upstairs apartment. Eventually, here enters the very attractive divorcee Allegra Gray, whom Mildred in one of her witty but acid observations speculates may or may not have been named after Dante’s “natural” child.  

Mrs. Gray is a consummate manipulator– very definitely not an excellent woman, and even perhaps one who deliberately sets out to target a man as if she “were going to buy a saucepan or a casserole.” The vicar is enamored, but when the secret engagement is revealed, Mildred and Winifred and other parishioners are thrown into chaos. Eventually the vicar comes to his senses, and the engagement is called off.  Quiet parish life goes on.

The book concludes with Mildred acceding to a near jaw dropping presumptuous request as her lot in life, ostensibly because it will be “a nice change of pace.”  Some book club members who had admired Mildred’s choice of a quiet, solitary life and her witty observations were quite disappointed in the ending, but overall, most members enjoyed this book and its window into the past.

Fans of Barbara Pym will be pleased to learn that award-winning British film producer Ellie Wood has acquired rights to Excellent Women, with an option to develop other Pym books.  She said, “I look forward to creating a “Pymverse” and bringing this iconic author’s uniquely British tales of comic observations and unrequited love not only to her legions of fans but also to a wider TV audience.”  

— Sue Martin