On her book route she is 'hunted' (quite literally) by the local parson, a vulgar and dangerous man, until something happens that puts both Cussy and her father's lives at risk of a public hanging. But her widowed father is set on marriage for his daughter - if anyone will have her. While the few blacks in the backwoods town of Troublesome Creek in which the book takes place faced fierce discrimination, the blues were even more hated.Ĭussy, or Bluet as she was nicknamed early on in life, becomes a book woman, and her work fills her with tremendous joy. Her skin is a vivid shade of blue, which gets so blue that it's almost purple when she blushes. Written by Kim Michele Richardson, this novel is based on these 'book women' with a major plot twist: The lead character, Cussy Mary Carter Frazier, is one of the infamous blue people of Kentucky, supposedly the last of her kind.

Women (and a few men) were hired as librarians, and they delivered and retrieved books via horse, mule, and donkey up and down steep trails and through dark forests. Roosevelt's Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, there were books.

In the 1930s in the hardscrabble mountains and hollers of eastern Kentucky food was scarce and jobs were backbreaking, but thanks to President Franklin D.

The book woman troublesome creek