2021 Book Review #9: The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

 

What a nice story!  A bit of drama, romance, and history all rolled into one.  

I wanted to read this book when I saw it in a local bookstore but the library had a long waiting list for it.  Then my blogging friend Susanne said how wonderful it was so I put in a 2nd request for the book and within a week, I was able to get it! 

STORY SUMMARY

Troublesome Creek is a little hardscrabble town in the Kentucky hills.   There is a lot of poverty, and a lot of prejudice against anyone different from the "white folk". 

They do have books though, thanks to President Roosevelt's Pack Horse Library Project.  This involves traveling librarians, known as Book Women, and their beloved book woman Cussy Mary Carter is well-known among the patrons assigned to her.  She is also well loved by her patrons.  Unfortunately, most of the town, is judgemental towards her and her Pa as they come from "Blue" folks.

Blue-skinned people are born that way. There was no known cause in the 1930s. They were despised and ridiculed as much as black people in Troublesome Creek.

Cussy is supposedly the last of her kind.....and she faces many trials because of her blue skin.  Cussy loves bringing her love of books and the books from the Project to the people of Appalachia.  But she faces many dangers, prejudices and suspicions along her route.

MY THOUGHTS

I was going to do a real plot summary but I don't want to ruin this book for you by revealing too much.  There are many layers to this book but the important one is the theme of courage and resilience that makes up Cussy's character. 

Each character presented is very well-developed as is the setting of the town and the outlying mountains.  It's actually quite exquisite and the language used is descriptive and symbolic. 

I learned something new in this story. I had never heard of blue-skinned people!

I learned that having blue skin is from the hereditary disease called Methemoglobinemia.  It is very rare and is a blood disorder.  It's caused in families by a recessive gene. It first came to the United States by way of a French orphan who came to Kentucky in 1820 to claim land on the Troublesome Creek. He married a Kentuckian who had red hair and white skin. They had no idea that 4 of their future 7  children would be blue. They both carried the same blue-blood recessive gene!  (the author talks about this in her notes at the end of the book).  Congenital methemoglobinemia is due to an enzyme deficiency. It is hereditary and carried in a recessive gene.  It was in the 1960s that an MD, from Kentucky, who was a hematologist who figured out what the blue skinned people suffered from. The author changes this historical data to be found in the 1930s to match her setting.

Her writing style is quite eloquent which is the opposite of the characters evoked and portrayed.  I loved this sentence " I huddled on the porch in the darkness, my ear flattened against the door, trying to sip the words from inside." (pg 117) "Sip the words"......she was slowly drinking them in....it's just a lovely poetic way to describe eavesdropping! There were many phrases like that!

This story deals with abuse, poverty, gossip, prejudice/racism. 

Some quotes really jumped out at me.  I'll share a couple of them:

"Hain't no harm.  Our hands don't care they's different colors.  Feels nice jus' the same, huh?" (pg 26, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, by Kim Michele Richardson c.2019)

"There's nothing wrong with your color, being you.....nothing wrong with what the good Lord gives us in His world, Cussy Mary." (pg 204) 

This book is a good historical fiction with a bit of romance that isn't too sappy.  I really enjoyed it! I liked that the author included real photos from journals or newspapers  about the Pack Horse Library Project and some notes at the end about the disease, the project, and the people of Kentucky.

In my opinion, this book is appropriate for ages 17 and older (due to mature content in some spots)

On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest, I rate this a 9.