Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

| Log in
  1. Follow us on Facebook
  2. Follow us on Twitter
  3. Follow us on Instagram
  4. Follow us on Goodreads
  5. RSS Feeds

  • Home
  • About
    • About CBR
    • Getting Started
    • Cannon Book Club
    • Diversions
    • Event Calendar
    • Fan Mail
    • Holiday Book Exchange
    • Book Bingo Reading Challenge
    • Participation Badges
    • AlabamaPink
  • Our Team
    • The CBR Team
    • Leaderboard
    • Recent Comments
    • CBR Interviews
    • Our Volunteers
    • Meet MsWas
  • Categories
    • Review Genres
    • Tags
  • Fight Cancer
    • How We Fight Cancer
    • How You Can Donate
    • Book Sale
    • CBR Merchandise
    • Supporters and Friends of CBR
  • FAQ
  • Contact
    • Contact Form
    • Newsletter Sign Up
    • Newsletter Archive
    • Follow Us
> FAQ Home
> Genre: Fiction > A beautiful portrait of a white outsider in 1930s Great Depression Kentucky

A beautiful portrait of a white outsider in 1930s Great Depression Kentucky

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson

February 26, 2021 by Mobius_Walker 2 Comments

Cussy Mary is a book woman for her tiny hill country town in rural Kentucky. She packs up books, magazines, and newspapers donated from major metropolitan cities and takes them to her patrons on her route as a part of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. She is largely well-liked and respected for the work she does and the opportunities she brings to an often ignored community through education and reading. She’s also blue. Not metaphorically sad and down. She has blue skin caused by a skin condition. So does her dad and so did her mom. They’re blue and, as such, treated as ‘colored’ people in Kentucky. Some people in her community do their best to ignore her skin color while others treat her less-than barring her from social groups and public spaces. The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek follows Cussy Mary as she tries to find her place in her community and come into her own power and self-acceptance.

I really enjoyed this book (the ending notwithstanding, but we’ll get to that later). Richardson beautifully captures the beauty of the hill country landscape of rural Kentucky and the relationship that poor people have with the land. Richardson is never condescending towards her characters nor does she pity them. She presents the stark reality of what it was like to be poor in the rural South during the Great Depression: the struggles, the prejudices, the ingenuity, the hopes, the fears, the triumphs great and small, everything. Even the dialects are written very well. Cussy Mary is educated and well read yet still speaks in a Southern dialect with its own vocabulary and syntax; as a Southerner myself who unlearned his accent to avoid stereotypes, I very much enjoyed the detail and respect given to dialect in this book and not using dialect as a measure of one’s intelligence.

But then there’s the ending. This ending came out of left field and smacked me in the head. There is such an intense tone shift that at first I thought I missed something. I will try to keep things as spoiler free as I can, but tread carefully. Firstly, despite there being a Black character and the main white character being considered “colored”, Richardson avoided using the n-word until the very end when a Hard-R is thrown out against a character when she is in a very vulnerable position. Secondly, there is violence that is described that had also been avoided up until this point (lengthy descriptions of violence, not violence itself). Finally, characters who had been mean or indifferent before became outright cruel. It was all very jarring, and maybe that was the intention, but I can’t shake the feeling that this scene was shoehorned in as a means to generate an ending where there wasn’t one. It simply doesn’t gel with the rest of the novel.

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: kentucky, Kim Michele Richardson, pack horse library, the book woman of troublesome creek, the great depression, The South, WPA

Mobius_Walker's CBR13 Review No:10 · Genres: Fiction · Tags: kentucky, Kim Michele Richardson, pack horse library, the book woman of troublesome creek, the great depression, The South, WPA ·
Rating:
· 2 Comments

About Mobius_Walker

CBR13 participantCBR13 CommentsCBR12 participant

Houstonian trying to teach the youths maths and aerial arts while making sure that my pets are healthy and my husband is happy View Mobius_Walker's reviews»

Comments

  1. Emmalita says

    February 27, 2021 at 7:26 pm

    My landlady read and loved this book a few months ago. She loved it and talked about it for a good two weeks.

    Reply
    • Mobius_Walker says

      March 1, 2021 at 11:48 am

      It is a very lovely book, but I still cannot square away that ending.

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.



Recent Comments

  • Emmalita on A gorgeous exploration of family, grief and loveThis one didn't connect with me the way her others have and I'm not sure why. She writes beautifully and evocatively and she knows how...
  • dsbs42 on Likable Rich White People ProblemsThank you for that response! I'm sorry I missed it until now.
  • Rooooomie on When favorite authors disappoint you, pt 2: disappoint harderI didn’t even think to check for other reviews of his books here, that’ll be an interesting little rabbit hole for me to go into...
  • Rooooomie on When favorite authors disappoint you, pt 2: disappoint harderI didn’t realize how quickly he writes books until I just had a look at what else he’s written. You are so right that they...
  • narfna on Targeting that local public radio niche audienceThe fanfic insights and excerpts were honestly my favorite part of that book. Dade knows her shit.
See More Recent Comments »

Want to Help Out?

CBR has a great crew of volunteers, and we're always looking for more people to help out. If you have a specialty or are willing to learn, drop MsWas a line.

  • How You Can Donate
  • FAQ
  • Shop
  • Volunteers
  • Leaderboard
  • AlabamaPink
  • Contact

Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo
© 2021 Cannonball Read | Log in