The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

Works Projects Administration - http://newdeal.feri.org/library/i15.htm

Images of the WPA librarians who carried books into rural areas during the Depression have been cropping up on Facebook recently, and they have piqued my interest in this early mobile library service, so I was intrigued to see this new novel coming out on May 7 by Kim Michele Richardson, herself a resident and scholar of Kentucky.

A couple pages in, and I feared that The Book Woman was heading into cornpone Beverly Hillbillies territory, but how wrong I was.  This story of Cussy Mary Carter, a “book woman” for the WPA in the hills of Kentucky during the Great Depression, tells about the heroic efforts of the real library women (and a few men) who traveled on horses or mules at great peril to deliver books, old newspapers, magazines, homemade scrapbooks of recipes and local folk remedies to people in the eastern hills of “Kaintuck” who were literally starving—for food, but also for reading material, letters, news, and stories that delivered hope, information, and entertainment.
Author Kim Michele Richardson deftly puts people’s speech patterns into the local dialect and intimately describes the hardscrabble life of people who were eking out livings by coal mining and subsistence farming in the dark and barren hollers.  But even more, she richly describes the customs and folklore of the region, the treacherous pathways to get to mountain schools and remote cabins, and the rare (and actual) blood disorder that affects Cussy Mary and her family and turns their skin blue, making them “colored” and subject to prejudice, isolation, and persecution.

How do people—and particularly, Cussy Mary and her family—survive and thrive in a time of hard living and isolation, prejudice, illiteracy, enslavement by coal companies and the resulting environmental issues and black lung disease?  These are all interwoven into an immersive story that is suspenseful, heartbreaking, and hopeful.  This corner of America in the 1930s is brought to life in a brilliant way, with so much to think about and to discuss.

Put this at the top of your list as it’s historical fiction at its finest.  The author's webpage provides information on her books: https://www.kimmichelerichardson.com/
Check out the giveaway on Goodreads!