The heart wants what the heart wants, and our hearts want books.

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What makes ‘home’? Is it a physical place, the items that abide within a house, the house itself, or perchance the people who inhabit and imbue the place and items with meaning, giving each thing a piece of their soul? Is it, as Sarah Monique Broom writes in her 2019 National Book Award winning memoir The Yellow House, a combination of all of these things, all ephemeral and indecipherable for all except for the person who is defining their home. Broom is a journalist and writer by training and by trade, and even though this is her first book, her work has been seen in publications such as the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine.

Broom has taken me on the most poignant journey over the past 24 hours (some of which has been spent sleeping, eating, and taking a real estate class- the irony of which is not lost on me). She describes the journey of her childhood home, the Yellow House, that shotgun house her mother purchased at the age of 19 with money acquired from her first husband’s life insurance policy, to its demolition after hurricane Katrina, and the sale of the land upon which the house stood in 2016. 

Her story, the story of her family, spans the city of my birth. Literally. I am not just talking about the tourist city of French Quarter fame, but of the same New Orleans East where I arrived at 6:50pm on Wednesday, January 23, 1985 at Humana Women’s Hospital. A hospital that no longer exists and upon the same address has been placed a shiny Wal-Mart and a Wendy’s. The two addresses I found in my 3am internet search are 6000 and 6020 Bullard Ave. Google Maps has kindly helped fill in the gaps of my knowledge, though I suppose I could call my mother. I probably will after she reads this blog post. My cousins and sister were born at Methodist hospital – destroyed in Katrina but rebranded and reopened as New Orleans East Hospital in 2014.

I have made my career out of finding buyers homes and helping sellers release their old one, but it is the story of a family home, the bedrock of generational wealth for so many families, that always touches my heart. Broom explores this sentiment about how her family identity from her maternal grandmother, to her mother, and all of her siblings was tied up in the striving and achievement of homeownership. It meant ‘you have arrived,’ that there is something immovable, this dirt, that literally grounds you. And the house that is built upon it contains the story of all the lives that have breathed within it, and the hopes for the family’s future.

What happens then when the embodiment of all those lives is filled with water and pulled from its foundation? It is an almost unimaginable tragedy for most, and I, like Broom, watched from afar (from Quebec, Canada, on an exchange trip I almost didn’t take because up until the day before we didn’t know the whereabouts of my family in the aftermath of the storm). I no longer call my birthplace home – Nashville has become my hometown – but it holds the roots of my family. It’s the place where all of my people are buried (yes, above ground) from both my mother’s and father’s families. My family was not stranded on the roof during Katrina, thank all that is holy, but some of their houses are gone. The family photo albums were destroyed. I think at this point there are less than 10 photographs of my mother as a child – ones that either she or her sister had at their homes in Tennessee and Mississippi respectively during the storm. Photos of my maternal grandmother and grandfather as children or youths probably don’t exist. These facts, the heavy emotional burden of them, is carried in every single one of us now, each of us manages that grief in different ways. It defines us as people, as a family, and as a part of the culture of the city.

Broom’s memoir about her family home and her family that lived within its walls can be triggering for those suffering from PTSD after Katrina. But it is also an important reminder of the inequalities that BIPOC have endured for generations. In their education, employment, neighborhood infrastructure, housing, and in access to resources after a tragedy. I have felt the privilege of my skin tone in every word Broom wrote. Because as close in geography as I and my people were to her Yellow House, our daily lived experiences could never have been more different.

My heart weeps. My wounds about home and the importance of place have been poked and prodded and left me emotional. I cry for the loss of all of New Orleans’ families, but especially those not deemed worth helping. I cry at the privilege those families who look like mine have become blind to seeing in the midst of such great tragedy that seems to be a “great equalizer” before the lord. Broom’s writing just shows how our lives truly are nothing alike, but how we can still love the same places and call them home.

Even after the deep emotional journey of reading this book in 24 hours was over, I’m still embedded in its pages (even though I read it on kindle). I am going to pick up a hardback copy as soon as I am able – and finally moved into the home Adam and I just purchased. Dealing with moving from homes during ‘normal times’ is stressful enough, and why I avoided typing up my thoughts for weeks after writing them at 3am in a journal, evacuating from your home because of a storm is an experience no one wants to have.

~Ashley

When Ashley told me she stayed up until the wee hours of the morning to finish Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, I had a list of expectations.  I expected it to be well written, engaging, and powerful.  Then she told me what kept her up all night, the second half of the book where Broom describes her family’s experiences during and after Hurricane Katrina, and I knew my reaction to this book would be very different than Ashley’s.  She’s from New Orleans, and her family is still (or again) there.  I’ve visited twice (once with Ashley, months before Hurricane Katrina), although my aunt did live there for decades.  Our engagement with the city is very different, so the book hit us very differently.  

First though, I want to say, Sarah M. Broom isn’t just someone who wrote a memoir, she’s a bookish author, she’s our kind of people.  I’ll let her words speak for her – “A house always insists on being kept.  Mostly I had to find shelves where my books could live.”  

The Yellow House is a gorgeous tale of family, home, and systemic racism.  While this book could only take place in a few locales around the world because of how the hurricane interacted with local geography and infrastructure, the underlying principles can be found in most western countries, perhaps most countries around the world, but certainly those with colonial ties.  

Broom starts her tale with the story of her grandmother.  This idea of starting a book this way speaks to my soul, because it gets straight to the heart of the family.  I didn’t fully understand the connection until I read Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, but now I can’t imagine another way to start any story of family.  Lolo shapes the family, including the author’s mom Ivory Mae, as she was shaped by the strong women in her life, including the one who taught her to “dress the body and dress a house like you would the body.  How she saw firsthand that cooking was a protected ritual, a séance.”  There is barely a mention of voodoo in the book, which highlights one of Broom’s points – tourists don’t know the real New Orleans, they only know the French Quarter and the legends.  

There are so many parallels that could be drawn between New Orleans and Nashville, and likely many cities.  There is contention between native-born residents and those who’ve relocated here (although in Nashville, we tend to accept you if you went to high school here).  As Broom talks about the limitations of seeing the French Quarter as New Orleans, I wonder what pieces of my city I’ve left out because I didn’t see them, not in any real way.  Some I’ve grown to know and adore, since I’ve been back as an adult, but others are still on my list to be explored.  I wonder how they’ll change before I get there, and what of their histories will be reflected in my view and experience when I do arrive.  

The Yellow House is about Broom’s family but also about their neighborhood, about New Orleans East, and how it was structured, how the interstate was constructed on land that previously held a vibrant Black community and a gorgeous avenue with hundreds of great oaks which were sacrificed for the “greater good.”  Broom takes the reader on the journey of her family and it’s engrossing.  We learn about Broom’s siblings and their experiences at school, and how a family with 12 children from three different marriages functions in the midst of this broader community.  Sarah’s experience of getting glasses made me laugh and reminisce, as my own experience was very much the same, a mix of shocked adults, ugly frames, and seeing the world for the first time.  It’s more than that though, this tale of the Yellow House is also a tale about Sarah’s world, as she grew up the youngest of a dozen children, going to high school with her nephew who was technically her elder, during the 1990s when the war on drugs was waged.  

As readers hit the halfway mark of The Yellow House, Hurricane Katrina has arrived.  The story of this family as they experience the storm, the tragedies after, and figure out how to survive, recover, and continue is heartbreaking yet also hopeful.  The tale of the author finding herself, the book within her, is my favorite part.  Despite her education and connections, it took 11 years for her to guide her mother through the Road Home program, reluctantly settling for a cash payout instead of rebuilding as Ivory Mae had wanted. 

I remember passing through the reading room multiple times as the storm was hitting and an alumni had evacuated from his graduate program at Tulane and was glued to the news all day.  He was awaiting news of his second home, his classmates, and his friends, awaiting to see if they’d have homes and a school to return to when the rain stopped and the waters receded.  I was disconnected, a college senior with a heavy course load and a job.  The stories my aunt told of her Metairie home was of one room being regularly flooded, but nothing major, and she’d lived in the area for decades.  Surely this wasn’t that different, until it was very, very different. 

It was 2010 when I started to understand, when Nashville flooded.  My home was fine, but my town was not.  I knew people who were rescued off of their roof, and I helped them demo their home as contractors walked the neighborhoods to make sure homeowners and volunteers knew how to safely and properly remove drywall so the frames could dry out, the first step of rebuilding.  None of this is included in the book.  No neighbors, no volunteers, no food trucks feeding those working to make sense of the mess the water made, no clean up at all, just people trying to go back into their homes to salvage what they could and then waiting on promises to come true, promises that left residents displaced for years, or maybe still. 

Here’s the piece of the book that really hit home for me, it’s how Broom connected with the Yellow House.  Her mother purchased the house years before Sarah’s birth, and it was the only place she lived until she went to college and entered a transient phase of life.  My family moved when I was a year and a half old, and then my mom and I moved again right after I graduated high school.  Even when I went “home” from college, it wasn’t to my home because it was a new house that I didn’t feel connected to in the same way.  I didn’t know the neighbors, I struggled to find my way around the new part of town (even though my grandparents were across the street and I’d grown up visiting).  And for Sarah, “as long as the house stood, … my father was not yet gone.  And then suddenly, he was.”  For me, it wasn’t that my father was gone, but that my family as I knew it was gone with that house.  My parents sold it as part of their divorce, as a way of creating a new start for my mom and me, who lived there during the divorce proceedings.  I wasn’t really present in our home during their divorce, between being a senior in high school, a color guard captain, and having a part time job, if I didn’t have to be somewhere else, then I found a reason to leave.  It was and wasn’t sudden, as my father had always traveled for work, so he was gone more than not, but it became more permanent as his things left, then the furniture in his bedroom, and that, combined with my shifts towards college led me to feel like everything changed when we left that house, even though the changes took place well before that.  It wasn’t until our last home, mine and Adam’s that I really felt like I had a home again.  For eight years, I didn’t really have one, just as Broom “no longer used the word “home,” did not feel [she] had one.”  Sitting in my house now, for the vast majority of the last four months, I recall the early days of being in the first home Adam and I bought, painting each and every inch of wall, and I want to do the same here.  Moving to that home, it was just us, but moving into this home, it was us, a 13 month old child, and a two year old, large, energetic dog.  We didn’t have the capacity to paint everything, and still don’t now, but I want to.  I want to make this home (we’ve lived in for seven years) my own through the colors on the walls, colors that I (with Adam’s input, yes, yes) select because this home is mine.  Broom chased her sense of home, and I’ve done the same in some ways, but ultimately, we each have to make that sense of home and decide what it means to us, and how to achieve it.  Is it paint (although I wouldn’t choose Mardi Gras yellow for my kitchen, but to each her own)?  Is it baking in the oven?  It depends on the person.

I give The Yellow House five stars, with a sad smile.  It is well written, engaging, and powerful, just as I expected.  It’s also haunting, tragic, and beautiful.  I doubt I’ll revisit it, particularly the second half, but I’m very interested in seeing what Broom does next.

~Nikki

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Dear readers, there are some sacrifices I think are worth it as a readerly parent.  Examples include: making a Link costume for literacy night with two days notice, in the middle of the week (read: not enough time for Amazon Prime to save me from a couple of late crafting nights), listening to SO. MUCH. Pokemon talk, and always needing to have an audiobook ready for any car ride over 10 minutes (and some less).  I could go on, but I won’t.  What I will say is recently (in the last two years), I’ve reread some of my childhood favorites and even shared some of them with my children.  B wasn’t into Tuck Everlasting (and I didn’t love it as much on reread, but we both enjoyed The Search for Delicious), but he’s gotten much further than I expected in Alanna: The First Adventure (because yes I did have to answer questions from my 8 year old about why pubescent Alanna woke up bleeding and the healer replied with a cup of tea).  I read the first two books in The Song of the Lioness Quartet maybe in middle school, then reread those and finished the quartet in 2017 (and then promptly consumed The Immortals, Protector of the Small, and Daughter of the Lioness within the year).  Perhaps it was the mostly new material, but I adored them so much that I bought a box set of the original quartet to help me finish reading it faster and to loan out (plus any other Pierce’s other titles I could find on sale on Kindle).  See also, Dear Tamora Pierce, please can we have more Numair?  Pretty please!!  With love, Me!

As further generations read, watch, and become obsessed with all things Harry Potter, my house, and my children are not immune.  Parents have different ways of handling this, perhaps reading a book a year until they’re done, perhaps a book then the movie, or perhaps a free for all until Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is done.  This last one was how things went with the eldest at my house because, well, that book goes darker than the first three, but also, if you, dear child, can handle The Last Olympian, then you can handle Goblet of Fire, but maybe we should read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix together.  So here we are.  He finished Goblet of Fire in 2019 and I was supposed to read it when Ashley and I had Kindle Unlimited last winter, and didn’t.  Now we are nearing the end of month four of this round of Kindle Unlimited, and I’m still working on it (64%).  (And he may or may not have put my Kindle in my hands multiple times in the last week and asked me to read Goblet of Fire.  Yes, I’m that mom, he’s the only one in the house who doesn’t know it’s in progress.)  Y’all IT IS SO LONG.  Also, I WANT TO READ ALL THE THINGS.  Also, while I’m enjoying the experience, I’m not enjoying it as much as others.  By others I mean, those my husband’s librarian friend refers to when she says “Millennials need to read a different book. If you’ve read the same book seven times, you’re not a reader.”  While she’s not wrong, it’s more nuanced than that.  If you only read one book or series every year, are you really a reader?  It’s debatable.  If you reread a series every year among your 100+ titles, then maybe you just really love it.  Also, we’re both millennials here, albeit older ones, and this is my first reread, 13 to 20 years after the initial read, so I think I, at least, am safe on this one.  I’m curious dear readers, what do you think of this?  

I have to confess, my reread of Harry Potter (1-4 pick one, it’s the same) is underwhelming, which is contributing to it taking so long.  Let’s discuss the first (and only) time I’ve read the Harry Potter series.  It was the summer of 2000 and I was at the library searching for something fun to reward myself with each time I finished a summer reading book for AP US History.  A close friend of the blog was working there and put the series in my hands, or books one through three because that is all that was out, then I found #4 when I and it were ready.  IT WAS PERFECTION, THANK YOU S!  Fast forward to 2005 when Half-Blood Prince was coming out and my boss is upset that I’ve never read Order of the Phoenix (because school interfered something fierce with my reading life).  He brought me his copy, attended the midnight distribution for Half-Blood Prince, and then loaned me that copy too (you’re the best B!).  Naturally, I promptly consumed both, despite my summer classes.  Fast forward to 2007 when Deathly Hallows came out.  Another friend pre-ordered a copy, read it, passed it to a friend, who passed it to me as I was driving through town on the way to a trivia team-building trip at the beach (yes, because that’s how we rolled, both of us, and it reminds us of several stories actually) and I spent the better part of the first two days with that book here or there or anywhere I could be.  I don’t remember a lot about the experience of reading the first four for the first time, but I do remember they were a breath of fresh air (and what wouldn’t be after reading Since Yesterday or The Fifties).  I remember the latter three being a consuming, glorious experience.  I hope the same will be true for the reread.  Only time will tell.

One would think an enjoyable book would still be enjoyable 20 years later, and they have been fine so far.  I enjoyed reading the Percy Jackson books a lot more last spring/summer (and then I was trying to keep up because I knew they were a high content level for my then seven year old and I wanted to be able to chat with him about the story and themes).  Maybe I’m overly familiar with Harry Potter  from seeing the movies so much (thank you ABC Family), but we haven’t even had cable in seven years, so even that has been a while.  I really enjoyed reading Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (as did my 8 year old, after he got over the format) and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, but something about the original Harry just isn’t landing as well as I’d hoped now, and I don’t like it.  Looking back, what I wish I might have considered is reading them in between all the challenging titles I’ve been digging into recently.  That’s how I got into the series in the first place, so maybe they would have landed better that way.  

I’m going to work to wrap up Goblet of Fire this week and maybe get through Order of the Phoenix this month too (especially as I put a hard copy on hold at the library for my child and will pick it up on Friday).  We’ll see about the last two, especially with school about to start up again (*facepalm*) and two book clubs coming up in the next few weeks.  

Speaking of book clubs, please do join us for:

• Virtual Book Club to discuss The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray on Friday, August 7!   Registration is open here.
• We’re joining ReadaBookwithKara to read and discuss Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.   You can check out the details here, put the August 1 livestream discussion on your calendar, and then read some of Kara’s work here.   

~Nikki

If you’ve met me, then you know I’m all about that #SlytherinLife. I married one, too, even though he refuses to read the books or watch the movies, he did take the sorting hat quiz on the Wizarding World website before there was a sign in requirement.  We’re ambitious, not just a little bit cunning, loyal, prideful, and skew to the traditional side. Not once have I deluded myself into thinking that I could have been in Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, or Hufflepuff. A Slytherin knows themselves.

This Slytherin, she knows that the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, in all its imaginative glory, is worth every re-read (as she admits in her H.W.B. bio that every summer a new book came out she re-read all of them again), putting a toe into the ridiculous world of Harry Potter fan-fic (Drarry anyone?) is worth the rabbit holes, and that sharing the life-altering fandom with the next generation (no matter the public short-comings of the author) is worth the thrill, wonder, and magic. Besides this current re-read with Nikki and her eldest little, I’ve been on a movie watch with Carla, my Ravenclaw partner-in-crime to Universal Studios and The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in L.A., with her eldest little. Other friends and I discuss when their littles are older at what age we will be introducing them into the fandom via the books and all the major plans of taking them to Orlando for their first Wizarding World experience. (Thanks KR and ET for the girl talk in the new house last week and bemoaning how nothing compares to midnight book release parties!) 

This re-read has been the first I’ve ever done on Kindle. I am thoroughly enjoying being able to highlight favorite passages (Ronald’s snark, y’all) and foreshadowing situations for what I know is coming in the later books (you have to admit, J.K. Rowling played the long game). I’m about 30% through Goblet of Fire with Nikki, but I’m not going to be like Ron and Harry completing their Divination homework and completely fudge my prediction on my completing it this week. If it happens, yay, if not, whoops. I own all of them in hardback and am not worried about my lack of access to them at the moment. (We are busy moving into our new house! Finally, I can unpack my books!) I’m not quite underwhelmed with the re-read, but it’s not my first re-read since the publication of Deathly Hallows as I pick up these books every couple of years for some comfort. I own the movies, all of them even including both Fantastic Beasts on video and book-form screenplay, and watch them often. 

Reading these books again is a comfort for me, as it is for others, because we see ourselves in the characters. We see these children, and the adults who surround them, dealing with hard, life-altering situations (dude, if Harry were a cat, he’d be on the last of his 9 lives). We see them overcoming hardship, we see them enacting the change they want to see (I love S.P.E.W. it’s one of my favorite themes in the books that are missing from the movies), they question the media (Rita Skeeter’s some ridiculousness, even though I dressed as her at a summer camp in 2005 – the summer of Half Blood Prince), and they love each other – both their friends and the humanity inherent in their enemies (that scene in the Room of Requirement with the fiendfyre). Just like with all good fiction, we learn how to treat others by modeling the best of our favorite fictional characters.

In this second half of 2020, re-read whatever you need to to get by and, in the immortal words of Ronald Bilius Weasley, I request that you “don’t let the Muggles get you down.”

~Ashley

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Sometimes you read a book well after the new has worn off, and then you kick yourself for not reading it sooner.  Dear readers, this is one of those times.  The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson is gorgeous, heart-breaking, and hopeful.  It’s an ode to the love and joy of books, the study of science, and overcoming ignorance and hate.  It’s set in 1936, and follows 19-year-old Cussy Mary, or Bluet as many call her.  She’s smart, hard working, and dedicated to her library patrons.  She’s the last of the Blue People of Kentucky and she’s a pack horse librarian.  During the book, we learn what it means, scientifically, to be a Blue, and what it means socially.  Cussy Mary demonstrates her strength, as she uses it for herself and her family, both blood and others she loves.  We also learn about life in Appalachia during the Great Depression and the Pack Horse Library Project, which was part of the WPA (Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency), about the way the people lived off the land as best they could, and about the racism experienced by both Blue and Black people.  The ultimate take away from this story, according to the author is “Poverty and marginalization are not so much economics or politics or societal issues as much as they are human issues.”  

As I’m getting ready to take my kids to the library later today, I can only imagine the joy Cussy Mary feels as she greets her patrons with their new loans, and the joy the patrons feel as they get new books.  Living in Appalachia in the 1930s must have been isolating, to be miles and treacherous paths away from your nearest neighbor and hours from town.  I feel like the pandemic has taught me several lessons about the value of community and the importance of connection (even as an introvert), as well as a bit about how it must have felt to go days without seeing anyone who doesn’t live in your house.  I didn’t know much about these brave pack horse librarians before reading this book, but I did know that Blue people are real, or were rather, since their color is a result of a rare recessive gene.  I was interested to learn about courting candles, where the wick burns out when the courter is to leave for the evening, and was surprised, then not, that Cussy Mary’s father would allow a courter to come a’ callin’ as he was leaving for his overnight shift in the mines (he didn’t really have an option, living such a remote life).  Some of the themes reminded me of Catherine Marshall’s Christy, but this book has more depth to it because it tackles more issues, including interracial marriage, domestic violence, overt racism against Black and Blue people, and the practice of medicine in the 1930s.  Perhaps that’s just me being 20+ years removed from my last reading of Christy, or perhaps not.  

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is a quiet tale of love, perseverance, and dedication as Cussy Mary Carter works to serve her patrons, to reach out to new ones, and to provide what help she can to those she comes across.  She lives with her father, her mother having died years ago from influenza.  Some of the townspeople and area residents adore Cussy Mary.  Others do not purely because she doesn’t look the same way they do.  Through the pages of this book, we get to know some of Cussy Mary’s patrons, along with their struggles and their goals.  We get to tag along with her for a while, which is an eye-opening experience to life in impoverished Appalachia during the Great Depression.  I don’t want to spoil any of the book, but I do give it 4.5 stars, so I’ll round up.  I wanted more ending after the last page, I might read it again, and I’ll definitely be looking for Richardson’s backlist.  And readers, if this doesn’t inspire you go get to know your local librarians, I don’t know what will!

~Nikki

Kim Michele Richardson is a Kentucky-born author who published The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek in May 2019 and is a New York Times, USA Today, and L.A. Times bestselling novel. She focuses on the history and people of Kentucky in all of her published books, including her 2012 memoir that tells her and other children’s story of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of the nuns of St. Thomas / Saint Vincent Orphan Asylum in rural Kentucky, The Unbreakable Child. Because of her experiences, she is an advocate for the prevention of child abuse and domestic violence. Additionally, she volunteers with Habitat for Humanity and built Shy Rabbit, a tiny house in the wilderness of Kentucky available for writer’s retreats. 

I know you’re not surprised at the amount of research I do about the author and the background of a story when it comes time to share with you, dear readers. When we started reading the book I was surprised to be informed, by our dear Nikki, that the Blue People of Kentucky are an actual Kentucky family descended from Martin Fugate who settled in eastern Kentucky 

Around 1800. This 2012 abc.com article gives a great overview of the family’s experience, explanation of the genetic condition called methemoglobinemia and how it’s passed through recessive genes. Of important note the article discusses that the disease can also be caused by chemical exposure: 

The disorder can be inherited, as was the case with the Fugate family, or caused by exposure to certain drugs and chemicals such as anesthetic drugs like benzocaine and xylocaine. The carcinogen benzene and nitrites used as meat additives can also be culprits, as well as certain antibiotics, including dapsone and chloroquine.

Richardson takes artistic license with some of the medical knowledge as regards to dates and treatments of the disease, but it doesn’t take away from the heart-wrenching story she weaves about all of the populace of Troublesome Creek, Kentucky.

Now, as for the Pack Horse Librarians I was most interested in the scrapbooks the librarians would create. I found this podcast conducted by The Kitchen Sisters which has historians weigh in on the primary source importance of these scrapbooks. Besides being a history nerd deep dive, it’s worth it to listen to the last living pack horse librarian tell her story. Standback, Ben Silbermann, these women were Pinteresting before you took it to the interwebz. Could you imagine travelling 18-20 miles a day on a horse you had to provide for yourself, alone through treacherous landscapes and weather, hauling donated books and only making $28 a month? Yeah, me either, and then creating these scrapbooks in their ‘extra time.’ These were some one thousand BA ladies (and a few gentlemen) who serviced about 1.5 million Kentuckians.

JoJo Moyes released The Giver of Stars in October 2019 which tells the story of an Englishwoman who marries an American and becomes a Kentucky pack horse librarian. I haven’t read the novel, but some criticism talks about how her book lacks the depth of research and feeling of place that Richardson has provided for her readers. I’m glad we read The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek before The Giver of Stars, as I appreciate the love and understanding of place that Richardson brings to her work. It’s also a 4.5 star read for me, I was a little frustrated at some of the artistic license, but the characters are the focus, and I love a book where the setting is also a character, determining the twists and turns of the plot.

And, in case you need a gentle reminder, some of our book club members (not us, yet) have already begun The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray so they can chat on Friday, August 7 without fear of spoilers!   Registration is open here. (Are we going to shame you if you don’t finish the book, or start it?  Nope, but we won’t try much to hold back on spoilers.) 

~Ashley