The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson
A Novel
Title: The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
Author: Kim Michele Richardson
Read by: Katie Schorr
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Publication Year: 2019
ISBN: 9781538521984
Rating: 3.75 stars
I don’t know if this review is going to be exciting to anyone because I think I’m just about the last person on earth to read this book. It has been recommended to me so many times and I just got around to reading it.
The story takes place in the 1930s and is about Cussy Mary Carter (named after her ancestral home of Cussy, France), a WPA packhorse librarian in Troublesome Creek, Kentucky. In addition to being a librarian, Cussy and her father also believe her to be the last blue person in Kentucky.
After the death of her mother and while worrying about her father, Elijah’s, health as he battles black lung, works in dangerous coal mines, and agitates for the union, her book route is pretty much the most important thing in Cussy’s life. Concerned about Cussy’s future after his death, Elijah is constantly trying to find a man for her to marry. Despite a decent dowry, suitors are rare because of Cussy’s blue skin. For many people in 1930s Troublesome Creek, her skin separates her from white people and puts her in the “colored” category. People try not to touch her and she is subject to the same segregation practices that her black friends have to endure. That makes it hard for her father to find her a husband, but Cussy isn’t too worried. She doesn’t really want to get married, and with her earnings as a book woman, can support herself. If she does marry, due to WPA rules, she will have to give up her book route. Eventually, a man named Charlie Frazier agrees to marry her. They are married and Charlie rapes and beats Cussy until he dies from exertion. Cussy is in rough shape, but she is able to return home with a mule named Junia, tell her father firmly that she will not remarry, and once she heals, she is able to resume her book route.
She and Junia travel all over the mountains to deliver books to a whole cast of lovable characters: Angelina a pregnant sixteen year old with a sick husband that Cussy suspects is a blue, a dear old woman with failing eyesight, families who are varying levels of resistant to reading, a school, a fire watchtower, and Jackson Lovett, a hot young bachelor freshly back from working on the Hoover Dam. While trying to keep her books in good shape and provide just what each one of her patrons needs, Cussy is dogged by Vester Frazier, a preacher and a cousin of Charlie’s, who wants to kill and probably rape her.
Vester tries to sneak into Cussy’s house one night while her father is in the mines. Junia, who hates men after also being beaten by Charlie, calls out a warning and Elijah, returning home from the mines, shoots Vester. As Vester dies from his wounds, Elijah sends her to get the doctor because it won’t look good if another Frazier dies in the hands of blue people. Cussy goes and in the meantime, Elijah tries to give Vester foxglove to heal him, but Vester dies anyway. Elijah knows that the prejudice against blue people will work against them and they are likely to be hanged for murder even though it was self defense.
The doctor agrees to keep the secret of Vester’s death if Cussy agrees to go to a hospital in Lexington with him so that he can run tests on her and study her. He has been interested in the blue people for some time, but no one has been willing to submit themselves or any biological material. Cussy doesn’t want to do it, but it won’t interfere with her book route and is the only way to protect herself and her father. Her first trip in Lexington is something out of a nightmare: she is held down by nuns and given a suppository sedative. She is made to get fully naked and is poked, prodded, and violated for nearly a day. While tied to the examination table, Cussy vows never to take part in it again, but on the way home when the doctor gives her medicine and promises to give her food, she realizes how much the things she gets from the doctor in exchange for her cooperation would help the people on her book route, so she agrees to go again.
Cussy continues to devote herself to her route and her patrons, loving those who need it most despite the vitriol she faces from the town about the color of her skin. The doctor finally diagnoses Cussy and her father with methemoglobinemia, a genetic blood disorder where their blood doesn’t get oxygenated enough which causes it to be a brownish color, which tints their skin blue. He prescribes pills that make Cussy violently ill but turn her skin white. She takes them despite the side effects until she realizes that the town’s prejudice isn’t going to end when her skin is white because in their minds, she’s still a blue.
One day on her route, Cussy comes to Angelina’s cabin to find her husband hanged outside and their newborn daughter laying on the ground. Cussy grabs Honey, the baby, and goes into the cabin to find Angelina dying from blood loss after giving birth. Angelina says that her husband ran out with the baby because she was born a blue person, she doesn’t know that he killed himself in the yard. It is Angelina’s dying wish that Cussy adopt her daughter because no one would love her except another blue person. Cussy agrees and takes Honey home and passes her off as a daughter conceived right before Charlie’s death. Jackson Lovett, who helps her bury Angelina and her husband, and Elijah are the only two people who know about Honey’s true parentage.
After Cussy brings Honey home, Elijah is more determined than ever to find a husband for Cussy. He worries about an unwed blue mother alone with a blue baby. Cussy prepares to fight once again for her right to stay unmarried, but the suitor who comes is none other than Jackson Lovett who confesses that he had to request to court her six times before her father agreed. Jackson says he loves her and promises that her father can move in with them and that he can get her dispensation to continue to be a librarian after they are married. She decides that she loves him too and agrees to marry him. Elijah dies in the mines that night and fellow miners bring his body home and bury him. He never got to hear the news of the engagement.
Several months later, Jackson, Cussy, and Honey go to the courthouse to get married. The wedding is delayed several times due to surprise appearances from Cussy’s patrons and coal miners standing in in Elijah’s stead, but eventually the two are legally married. However, upon exiting the courthouse, they find a mob outside. The police claim that by marrying a blue person, Jackson has broken anti-miscegenation laws. He tries to stand up for his marriage, but he is beaten and put in jail. Cussy and Honey are threatened but allowed to go home.
The book then skips to 1940. Jackson is out of prison, but is banned from the state of Kentucky. He sneaks in occasionally to see Cussy and Honey and the family is planning to relocate to some place they can all live together.
Before reading this book, I knew that both pack horse librarians and the blue people of Kentucky are pretty cool, so I was very excited to read it (all the recommendations helped too). I definitely liked the book, but I thought it was a little predictable. I have previously read Jojo Moyes’ The Giver of Stars, which is a very similar book about pack horse librarians in Kentucky in the 1930s that also came out in 2019. I really loved that book because I’m a Jojo Moyes fan, and this one didn’t really light me up in the same way (possibly just because they are so similar). However, at the time of publication, there were some accusations that Moyes had plagiarized The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. Moyes and her publishers denied the accusations and neither party pursued legal action and it seems like the issue was dropped, so I’m not the only one who read one book and got déjà vu reading the other one.
Similarities aside, there weren’t a ton of surprises in the book. For the most part Cussy fits the mold of a lot of female heroines: she’s plucky and emotionally strong, she yearns to be independent and break gender conventions, she is extremely attractive while thinking she’s average-looking, and she goes out of her way to help others and everyone loves her for it even though she often doesn’t realize the depth of their love. Most of the major emotional beats of the story were all heavily hinted at throughout the book and you could see them coming a mile away. I have said before that I like romances because I like the predictability, and I stand by that, but I at least like to pretend that it’s a surprise. This book lacked the subtlety for me to pull that off. Richardson also went a little hard for my taste with the poverty porn and the excess of sexual violence. I think her heart was in the right place. I think she was trying to create sympathy for people living in depression-era poverty in rural areas while showing Cussy’s good heart with her care for them. I think she also was trying to emphasize the bravery of the packhorse librarians by showing the dangers of being a woman in general without the additional risks traveling alone brought. Those messages do come across, but the execution is so heavy handed that it just feels like Richardson is emotionally manipulating the reader.
There are some historical inaccuracies pertaining to the discovery of methemoglobinemia, but Richardson did that intentionally and addresses it in the afterword.
The story is good though and I got sucked in to listening and completely lost myself in it. The audiobook is read by Katie Schorr, and she does a good job. She uses a slight Kentucky accent—it’s much lighter than a traditional Eastern Kentucky accent and it’s not heavy enough to come across as mocking and offensive. It gives a little flavor without being hokey. One of my biggest issues with audiobooks is that I have listened to so many audiobooks of stories that take place in Appalachia and the attempts at accents and the mispronunciations of words and names are insulting. I’m not familiar enough with this area of Kentucky to be positive that nothing was pronounced wrong, but I think the narration was good overall.
In 2022, Richardson published a sequel about Honey returning to Troublesome Creek and picking up her mother’s old packhorse library route. The WPA packhorse library program ended in 1943, when Honey would have been seven years old, so I’m not sure how that works out. I am probably going to read it to find out.