The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
In 1936, in the remote eastern Kentucky hollers of the Troublesome Creek watershed, nineteen-year-old Cussy Mary Carter is one of the last blue-skinned Kentuckians, a descendant of a real family line whose distinctive methemoglobinemia-tinted skin makes her a target of the same suspicion and law that regulates race across the American South. Cussy rides a stubborn mule up and down the hollers as a packhorse librarian for Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, carrying donated books, magazines, and scrapbooked recipes to isolated farmsteads, one-room schoolhouses, and coal-camp widows whose husbands are not coming back. Kim Michele Richardson's 2019 novel is grounded in real Pack Horse Library Project history and the documented Blue Fugates of Kentucky, and reads as both regional historical fiction and a portrait of what a book can still do in a place nothing else reaches.
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What you might want to know about The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In 1936, nineteen-year-old Cussy Mary Carter rides a mule through the Kentucky hills as part of the Pack Horse Library Project. Cussy is one of the last Blue People of Kentucky, and the locals are not all kind.
Yes. The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is built around the real Pack Horse Library Project, a Depression-era WPA initiative that delivered books to remote Appalachian communities. The protagonist's blue skin draws on the documented Blue Fugates of Kentucky.
Yes. Kim Michele Richardson wrote a sequel, The Book Woman's Daughter, set 20 years later. Both novels can be read independently, but the sequel deepens through familiarity with the first.
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek was written by Kim Michele Richardson, published in 2019 by Blackstone Publishing.
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is 320 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is a standalone novel by Kim Michele Richardson, not part of a series.
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.