The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

By Kim Michele Richardson

Sourcebooks     2019

308 pages     Literary

The most important aspect of an historical novel is the research that goes into it. Richardson has done an incredible job in creating an historical novel that is both creative and meticulously researched. It is the story of a young woman in 1930s Kentucky Appalachia. My book club read it this month and we had a lively discussion last week.

Cussy Mary, a young single woman, lives in the hills and hollers of Kentucky during the 1930s. She has applied and been accepted as a pack horse librarian, which was a job for women, sponsored by the WPA. Her job is to deliver books by horseback to the people on an established route in her mountain neighborhood. She knows her readers well and works very hard to find the materials that her clients want—everything from the classics to magazines to newspapers, many weeks old by the time they get to Cussy. She makes her way through the mountains on a mule named Junia, who is both her protector and best friend as well as the carrier of the library materials Cussy carries.

What distinguishes Cussy Mary from other young women of the area is her color. She is one of the last of the Blue People of Kentucky. This was a clan of blue-tinged people that had populated the area for several generations. They have hidden in the hills because they have been ridiculed and shunned and classified as inbreds, which they were not. Thank goodness for Google, because I had never heard of the blue people, but when I read up on it, I discovered that this aspect of the story line was remarkably true.

It would appear that Cussy (or Bluet, as she was called by her clients) had more than three strikes against her, but she is strong and feisty, and she prevails. She loves her job and takes pride in the help that she offers her clients. People rely on her to read stories to them, bring them news from the outside world, and even provide food if necessary. Her work is a testament to the power of reading and books.

There’s a lot of heartbreak in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, not just for Cussy Mary and her father, a miner, but also for the people in the hills. The description of life is remarkable, thanks to the skilled writing of Richardson. Here is one paragraph. “I found the tiny cabin stitched into a mountain, tarred with black pine and stingy sunlight. In the yard, two crows drank from mud puddles. Overhead, more cawed before dropping down to scar the yard. Two sick chickens peeked around the corner of the cabin, their combs and wattles festered with the fowl pox. A rawboned dog dozed on the crumbling porch. Junia snorted, and the pup raised its mangy body and flattened its flea-bitten ears before slinking off.” Inside, Cussy finds her favorite child client, Henry, and his siblings suffering from pellagra, and Henry is dying.

One reviewer says that Richardson doesn’t “pull punches when it comes to describing the hardscrabble lives of the hill people.” Yet, I considered the descriptions to be fairly realistic, contrasted, as they were, with great moments of hope and kindness. I do have to say that the ending is quite abrupt, and we are not allowed enough time to enjoy the happiness that Cussy Mary finds as she discovers true love and her life moves on to another level. The only weakness I found in a totally engrossing book.

This is a terrific review in bookreporter.com.  Kim Michele Richardson’s website. It looks like she has a follow-up book about Cussy’s daughter, Honey, called The Book Woman’s Daughter. It arrives next May.

I can highly recommend The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. I especially enjoyed the pictures of the Kentucky Pack Horse librarians that come at the end of the book. 

Hillbilly Elegy: A memoir of a family and culture in crisis

by J.D. Vance

HarperCollins     2016

264 pages     Memoir

I began seeing J.D. Vance on the news circuit in the weeks prior to the election. He represented the white working class voters among the pundits and the talking heads on CNN and explained to television audiences why his "people" voted for Donald Trump. He was an eloquent spokesperson for the conservative voters that the "liberal elite" have had a hard time understanding. In an interview, he said, "for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of a life we left behind continue to chase us."

He begins Hillbilly Elegy by saying that he finds it ludicrous that anyone would be reading his book, because he hadn't done anything "great in his life." But those of us reading his book find that he has done something quite remarkable. He has laid bare the life of the working poor in a way that builds understanding and acceptance. 

Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, just up the road from my sister's house in West Chester, Ohio, but it might as well be a world away. Vance's family moved en masse from Kentucky to work in the steel mills of Middletown, making more money than they could have in the hills of Kentucky, but then the jobs went away and misery ensued. The strong social ethic of the hills stayed with those transplants, and that social ethic continues to be the driving force in their lives.

Vance was raised by his grandparents and an older sister because his mother couldn't get her life together enough to care for him. His grandparents fiercely protected him, pushed him, prodded him, and threatened him. “The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future — that if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose.” He nearly didn't graduate from high school, but following graduation, he enlisted in the Marines and served in Iraq. Following his military service, he attended Ohio State and Yale Law School. Today, at 31,  he is a business executive, married and living in Silicon Valley.

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance tells the difficult story of his upbringing,  and as he probes for us (and even more importantly, for himself) how he survived and figured out how to thrive, we liberal intellectuals begin to understand how those people around us, like J.D. and his family, came to feel disenfranchised and thus elected a billionaire populist to the presidency. My husband said that the book helped him understand why Michigan's rural areas went pretty solidly for Trump.

I asked my husband what he had learned from reading Hillbilly Elegy. He said that he was struck by the intense loyalty Vance feels for his family, for his grandparents (both now dead), for his sister, and even for his drug addicted mother. My husband said he respected so much how Vance could look beyond the pain of his upbringing to understand the circumstances that caused it. For instance, Vance ponders how some members of his family built stable families, held decent jobs, and maintained sound economic foundations, while his mother floundered so badly. My husband inferred, however, that there is just as much potential for painful upbringings in the lives of "so-called intellectuals" as there is in the white working class. 

At the same time that Vance speaks about how much he loves his family, he is highly critical of those people who feel that they have little control over their lives. He concludes: “I believe we hillbillies are the toughest god----ed people on this earth. But are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children? Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. . . . I don’t know what the answer is precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

My husband and I read Hillbilly Elegy aloud, and we like everyone else we know who read it, greatly appreciated its lessons for us. We highly recommend it for its readability and its life lessons. It is easy to see why it has remained on the bestseller lists for so long.

Review in Washington Post.

J.D. Vance website.

Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

Harper Perennial     2012

433 pages     Fiction

Dellarobia Turnbow is the young mother of two preschool children living in a small house on the family farm in Appalachia. "...being a stay-at-home mom was the loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself." As Flight Behavior opens, she is on the way up the mountain to a small cabin to meet a man with whom she has been having a flirtation. She is on the cusp of throwing her life and marriage away when she has a Moses-like burning bush experience. Thoroughly freaked-out by the message she believes has come from God, she turns around and goes back down to her mundane life filled with guilt and promises to do better. 

She later discovers that her burning bush is in actuality a gathering of millions of monarch butterflies, and the discovery changes her life. The discovery of the monarch butterflies creates a media and scientific frenzy. The monarchs are not supposed to be there, but their winter habitat in Mexico has been destroyed. A biologist named Ovid Byron arrives from New Mexico to study the monarchs, and he brings along with him equipment, student assistants, and later, a job for Dellarobia.

Flight Behavior explores the relationships between Dellarobia  and her family, friends, and community. The book, however, is only in part about Dellarobia (I just love saying that name!). It is in large part an exploration of the relationship between the monarch butterflies up there on the mountain and the effects of global warming that brought them there in the first place. Kingsolver is not subtle in her feelings about global warming, nor is she subtle in the way she expresses those feelings. In some ways, this is a polemic about global warming in the guise of a novel. But, the book is redeemed by a cast of characters that is incredibly appealing. You learn a lot of science in amidst the family drama, and believe me there is plenty of drama. These are complex, fully developed characters for the most part, although some of the minor characters are caricatures. 

Kingsolver chooses to write novels that are not just a good read, but she wants to make a point regarding social justice. In an interview with Diane Rehm, she says: "That was my plan because novelists really aren't writing about climate change. Well, it's pretty rare for novelists to write about science, in general, so because I was trained as a scientist, I really like to write about science and about the methods of science. And part of the difficulty of this conversation, non-conversation, that as a nation we're having or not having about climate change, is that it's hard for people even always to understand the language of science." So, she has a message about global warming for the non-scientist, using Dellarobia as the foil. Dellarobia is a sponge for knowledge, and over the course of this scientific journey, Kingsolver dispenses her scientific knowledge, and Dellarobia, as well as her son, Preston, soak it up. In the end, it is the science of the monarch butterflies and global warming that causes Dellarobia to make major changes in her life.

Kingsolver's social justice point of view is obvious in two definitive scenes: the first involving an environmentalist who sets up shop on the mountain to tell the locals about how to behave responsibly about the environment. One of his solutions is to fly less, but of course none of the people in Dellarobia's family have ever been on a plane. The other scene is the shopping trip Dellarobia and her husband take to the dollar store to buy Christmas gifts for their children, and all they can afford is cheap, foreign made junk, and she despairs the idea that another generation of children are bound by poverty. 

One of the things that Kingsolver really understands is the relationship of religion to the lives of Appalachian people. Chapter 3 is a description of a southern church that I found to be worth the price of the book. Dellarobia was "what Hester (her mother-in-law) called a 911 Christian; in the event of an emergency, call the Lord." She goes to church because it is conventional; in her world view, everything is open to question, but that is not the style of the southern church. She has been kicked out of the Wednesday evening Bible study because she asked too many questions and made too many unorthodox observations.

The comment made by Ovid, the biologist, is Kingsolver's message. When he is describing to Dellarobia the diminishing coral reefs and dying insects, he laments: "What was the use of saving a world that has no soul left in it." 

My book club had a lively discussion about the book, probably evenly divided between those who loved it and those who thought it was only marginally successful. Frankly, I am in the marginally successful camp. I found the science part of the novel cumbersome and didactic. The ending, no matter how symbolic and breathtaking, was a bit cheesy. (Dare I say that about such a famous novelist.) 

On the plus side, Kingsolver is a compelling writer, and I found myself underlining some marvelous statements on nearly every page. She understands human nature extremely well, which makes Flight Behavior worth reading, even if it has less than glorious moments.

Kingsolver is committed to social justice, and her books reflect her views. Apparently, she has even established an award called the PEN/Bellweather Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. 

A review that finds Flight Behavior to be marvelous: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/books/review/flight-behavior-by-barbara-kingsolver.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

A review that finds Flight Behavior to be problematic: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/11/barbara_kingsolver_s_flight_behavior_reviewed.html

Interview from the Diane Rehm Show:  http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-11-08/barbara-kingsolver-flight-behavior/transcript

Barbara Kingsolver's website: http://www.kingsolver.com/