Summary: The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

The GIST

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson braids together two true and little-known pieces of Kentucky history and hands them to one unforgettable heroine. The first is the Pack Horse Library Project, a New Deal program that paid women to carry books on horseback and muleback into mountain country that had no libraries at all. The second is the Blue People of Kentucky, a family line from the Troublesome Creek area whose skin was tinted blue by a rare inherited blood condition. Richardson's narrator, nineteen-year-old Cussy Mary Carter, is both: a Book Woman cherished along her route and a Blue who is feared, shunned and sometimes hunted.

Published in 2019, the novel became a New York Times bestseller and a favorite of book clubs and librarians. Critics praised its research and its narrator's voice, with Kirkus calling it a unique story about Appalachia and the healing power of the written word. It is a book about what reading can do for people who have almost nothing, and about how a community decides who belongs. It is also frank about the hunger, violence and bigotry of its time and place.

The Story

The year is 1936, deep in the Great Depression, in the hills of eastern Kentucky. Cussy Mary lives in a cabin in a holler with her father, Elijah Carter, the man she calls Pa. Her mother, who loved books, is long dead. Cussy, named for the village in France her family came from, believes she and Pa are the last of the Blues. The townspeople have another name for her, Bluet, and another category: in the segregated world of Troublesome Creek, a Blue is counted as "colored," neither white nor Black, and can expect the treatment that goes with it. Cussy has grown up knowing that Blues have been lynched over trifles, and that any hint of trouble tends to be laid at a Blue's door.

Pa is a coal miner whose blue skin mostly disappears under coal dust. Years underground with no protection have ruined his lungs, and he is slowly dying. He is also helping the miners organize against the owners, which Cussy fears makes him a target twice over. Pa's one great worry is what will become of his daughter when he is gone. He thinks books are overrated and that a woman's place is at home, and he is set on finding her a husband whatever it takes. So suitors come to the cabin, and for each one Pa lights a courting candle; the visit lasts as long as the flame. Cussy dreads every one of these evenings. She loves her independence and her work, and a married woman would not be allowed to keep the job.

That job is everything to her. As a librarian for the Pack Horse project she rides out along creek beds and up steep, slippery trails with saddlebags of books, magazines and badly out-of-date newspapers, all of them donated, since the government pays only the salaries. The librarians paste together scrapbooks of recipes, sewing patterns, home remedies and prayers so that isolated families can share what they know. Once a month Cussy goes into town to sort books at the library center; the rest of the time she works from an outpost she has set up in the hills. For the people on her route she does far more than deliver. She reads aloud to those who cannot read, teaches others their letters, carries news, brings food and medicine when she can, and offers plain company to people who see almost no one.

To Cussy's relief, no man wants to marry a Blue, until Pa adds ten acres of land to the bargain. That brings Charlie Frazier, a much older hill man. The wedding is rushed and quiet, and the wedding night is a horror: he rapes her and beats her badly. Then he collapses and dies, apparently of a heart attack. Cussy goes home to the holler a widow after a single night, with injuries that will not fully heal, a grudge-bearing clan of in-laws, and one useful inheritance: Charlie's bad-tempered mule, Junia.

Junia is one of the book's delights. She is stubborn and far more inclined to kick up a fuss than to do as she is told, and she has no use at all for men. With women and children she is gentle. She will not set foot on a stretch of trail she judges unsafe, and she gives warning when danger is near, so that on the lonely miles of the route she is Cussy's guard as well as her transport.

Back at work, Cussy throws herself into her rounds, and through them we meet the hill people. Angeline Moffit is sixteen, pregnant and eager to learn; she is one of the very few who will take Cussy's hand without a thought. Her husband, Willie, will not so much as look Cussy in the eye, and even when he is wounded he refuses her help. Loretta Adams, elderly and nearly blind, becomes a friend. At the one school in the region the teacher, Winnie Parker, receives the books with gratitude, and it is there that Cussy comes face to face with what hunger is doing to the children. Many suffer from pellagra, a disease of starvation. One boy, Henry Marshall, wastes away in front of her. When she tries to slip him something to eat, the teacher stops her with a hard rule: either everyone is fed, or no one.

In town the picture is uglier. At the library center the assistant head librarian, Harriet Hardin, never misses a chance to humiliate her, going so far as to mark the building's only bathroom for whites only. Cussy's one ally there is Queenie Johnson, a fellow Book Woman and one of a handful of Black residents in the area, who supports five children on her own and is set on making a better life.

Two men enter Cussy's story after her widowhood. One is Jackson Lovett, a new patron on her route, just home from out West, where he worked on the Hoover Dam. He reads, he talks to her as an equal, and she begins, cautiously, to imagine more. Even Junia grudgingly tolerates him, which says a good deal. The other is Vester Frazier, a hill preacher and kinsman of her dead husband, who has made up his mind that the blue woman needs saving. He shadows her along the trails. Cussy knows that people he has forced into his baptisms have drowned, and she knows she is in real danger.

Vester's pursuit comes to a head one night at the Carter cabin, and what happens there leaves father and daughter desperately exposed, because a Blue can hang for far less than crossing a Frazier. They turn to the one man with the standing to shield them: Doc, the local physician, who for years has begged to study the Carters' blood. His price is Cussy's cooperation. He takes her to a hospital in Lexington, where nuns strip her, she is drugged, and she is examined in ways that shame and frighten her. Doc is not a villain. When a colleague wants to keep her there by force for study, he refuses, and he pays her in food, which she carries straight to the starving schoolchildren.

The tests yield an answer. Cussy and Pa have methemoglobinemia, an inherited disorder that leaves the blood short of oxygen and tints the skin blue. There is even a remedy, a pill of methylene blue. Pa wants nothing to do with a cure. Cussy takes it and watches her skin turn white. The effect is brief and comes with pounding headaches and vomiting, but for a while she delights in looking like everyone else. Then she learns what it is worth. The townsfolk take her changed color for a sign of sickness they might catch, and when she tries to join a sewing circle she is turned away as coldly as before.

From there the story moves toward a visit to the Moffit cabin that changes everything for her, and toward a reckoning over whether a Blue woman may love whom she chooses. Those chapters, and the price they exact, belong to the reader.

What It's Really About

The novel's deepest subject is prejudice, and its sharpest insight comes with the pill. Cussy's blue skin, it turns out, was never really the problem. When the color fades, the contempt stays, which shows that the fear of her was about the need to have someone to look down on. Richardson sets Cussy's experience beside that of Queenie and of the starving hill families so that the reader sees a whole ladder of exclusion, and sees also how the people at the bottom of it look after one another.

Its second subject is the power of books. For families cut off by mountains and poverty, a worn magazine or a novel is a window onto the wider world, and Cussy's patrons are as hungry to learn as she is to teach. Classic titles thread through the story; one reviewer singles out a starving boy reading Peter Pan aloud to his family as the scene that stayed with her. The history behind this is real. The packhorse librarians rode long routes in rough weather for a salary of twenty-eight dollars a month, supplying their own mounts, and they were often the only source of reading matter for the people they served.

There is also a tender, complicated father-and-daughter story. Elijah means well and gets it badly wrong, trusting men who harm his daughter and trying to secure her future through a marriage she does not want. Yet his love for her is never in doubt, and critics have praised how beautifully that bond is drawn. And there is Cussy herself. She begins as a gentle soul who will ride anywhere for a patron but cannot stand up for herself, and she slowly learns her own worth and starts to set limits. She tells her story in the speech of the hills, which reviewers have found unexpectedly poetic.

Readers should know what they are getting. Some find the pacing slow, the nature description heavy, and the ending hurried and melodramatic, and the book contains rape, a medical ordeal and the deaths of children from hunger. But most readers end up attached to Cussy, to Junia, and to the idea that carrying a book to someone who needs it is an act of love.

Who Should Read It

This is a natural choice for lovers of historical fiction, for anyone who has ever worked in or been rescued by a library, and for readers curious about Appalachia, the New Deal or the real story of Kentucky's blue-skinned families. It suits book clubs especially well, because there is so much in it to argue over. If you want a novel that honors forgotten women and makes the case for reading as a lifeline, and you can bear some hard scenes along the way, Cussy Mary is worth riding with.