Story for the Week
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The voter registration deadline in the U.S. is somewhere between 15 and 30 days prior to election day, depending on your state and how you choose to register. Our presidential election takes place in 79 days. That’s right…79 days. Early voting in my state starts in about 5.5 weeks on September 26…only 39 days!
This will be the first election in which my daughter can vote for president. She was eligible to vote in the primary, and I have always taken her with me when I vote. I firmly believe that we should vote in every election—local and federal. If we choose not to vote, we have no right to complain about the outcome because we have left the result in everyone else’s hands.
In the last presidential election, about two-thirds of eligible voters cast a ballot. The good thing about that was that it was the highest turnout on a percentage basis since 1900. The bad thing about that was that one-third of the eligible population didn’t care enough. That may sound like an ok turnout, but about 73 million people made up that one-third.
According to worldpopulationreview.com, there are more than 210 million registered voters in the U.S., and with the Gen Z’s coming of age, it’s estimated that 244 million citizens will be eligible to vote in November. I hope that they do. I also hope that our country survives the current division.
I have friends and family on both sides of the aisle. I talk politics with some of them. With others, I don’t. I still hope all of them vote, and I hope all of them can move past the division when the election is over and the country can move forward.
Back in November 2016, I posted on Facebook: I have seen people unfriend and unfriended. I have seen some of the most vile and hateful posts and actions against other human beings, against people we called our friends…and for what? At the end of the day, how we treat those closest to us has no impact on the people in government. It only impacts our daily lives. We need to remember that ALL of us have family and friends who voted for another candidate…. We ALL know and love someone who voted differently than we did. Our ability to work together to overcome our differences is what makes this country great. We don’t need to leave it to the politicians. We just need to treat people the way we want to be treated.
Two days later, when people were still attacking one another, saying some of the most vile things, I posted: The only thing that changes anything is when we start working together and treating each other well. Someone once told me that Facebook is a cancer, and these are the types of situations that prove that…. Let’s move forward. Try to be kind.
All of that stands. Make sure you’re registered, and make sure you vote…and then please be kind.
Book Review
⭐⭐½
2.5 Stars for Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller
301 pages
Publisher: William Morrow
Publication Date: June 18, 2024
Purchased on Amazon.
Publisher’s Description
Beverly Underwood and her arch enemy, Lula Dean, live in the tiny town of Troy, Georgia, where they were born and raised. Now Beverly is on the school board, and Lula has become a local celebrity by embarking on mission to rid the public libraries of all inappropriate books—none of which she’s actually read. To replace the “pornographic” books she’s challenged at the local public library, Lula starts her own lending library in front of her home: a cute wooden hutch with glass doors and neat rows of the worthy literature that she’s sure the town’s readers need.
What Lula doesn’t know is that a local troublemaker has stolen her wholesome books, removed their dust jackets, and restocked Lula’s library with banned books: literary classics, gay romances, Black history, witchy spell books, Judy Blume novels, and more. One by one, neighbors who borrow books from Lula Dean’s library find their lives changed in unexpected ways. Finally, one of Lula Dean’s enemies discovers the library and decides to turn the tables on her, just as Lula and Beverly are running against each other to replace the town’s disgraced mayor.
That’s when all the townspeople who’ve been borrowing from Lula’s library begin to reveal themselves. That’s when the showdown that’s been brewing between Beverly and Lula will roil the whole town…and change it forever.
************
Main Characters:
- Beverly Underwood – long-time rivals with Lula Dean since she didn’t select Lula to be on the cheerleading squad in high school, has long been a pillar of the community in Troy, head of the school board
- Lula Dean – had been known as the town crank since her husband died and her children left town, formed a Concerned Parents Committee that pulled a bunch of books they wanted banned from the library
- Too many other characters to describe, which is one of the problems I had with the book
Trigger warning: Every hot-button political issue currently in the news along with suicide and sexual assault
A good friend asked me to take a look at this title because it was her book club read, and she was curious to know my thoughts. I had just finished a book, and I thought it sounded funny, so I shifted things around to fit it in. I like the premise of the book. The execution of the story, in my opinion, leaves a lot to be desired.
Lula Dean spearheads an effort to pull books off the library shelves…books that fly in the face of the values she claims the town should represent. Beverly Underwood agrees to store the books in her basement until a decision can be made on what to do with them. In the meantime, Lula sets up her own lending library with the books she thinks the townspeople should be reading—101 Cakes to Bake for Your Family, Our Confederate Heroes, Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Southern Belle’s Guide to Etiquette, to name a few. You get the idea.
Unbeknownst to Lula, Beverly’s daughter Lindsay, with the help of a boy named Ronnie, high on mushrooms and believing Lindsay is an angel, replaces the books in Lula’s library with some of the banned books from her mother’s basement. She succeeds because she swaps the dust jackets, so the person who selects Buffy Halliday Goes to Europe! end ups reading Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Maus replaces The Art of the Deal. The Proof of the Honey replaces A Caledonian Fling.
Each chapter in the book starts with a book title, and the chapter revolves around the person who selects that book from the library or someone who has read the book in the past and discovers the switch. Eventually, someone decides to reveal Lula’s hypocrisy because what she claims publicly is not how she acts privately. Intertwined with all the book swaps is the battle between Lula and Beverly in the race for mayor along with the struggle to reveal the tainted history of Augustus Wainwright, the general of the Confederate Army, and his actions in the time of slavery.
The small, conservative town of Troy, Georgia, tackles every conservative hot-button issue in the United States news today. The book is billed as provocative and hilarious. Provocative, yes. Hilarious, not so much. It started well. Ronnie is funny. An early chapter describes a woman who bakes herself a pretty risqué birthday cake. But as the book progresses, it feels more like the author really just wanted to write a book attacking the right shortly before an election while trying to put a fictional spin on it, so she could say, “it’s just a made-up story.”
At the end of the day, there are way too many characters whose stories intertwine but are mostly disconnected and difficult to follow. No single book is going to change someone’s mind about a political opinion they hold, which is what happens to characters in this book who pick up a book expecting one thing and getting another. And I feel like this will breed more divisiveness. People on the left will agree wholeheartedly with a lot of this book, and people on the right will say this is exactly what they’re fighting against and this is why.
The author’s note indicates that she has a complicated relationship with the South, having grown up in rural North Carolina. She says, “There is so much to love about the Southeastern states—and so much that hurts my soul. But I want to make it perfectly 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.”
While the ideas are the same, it feels like that would be a more palatable discourse than the fictional exaggeration in this book.
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