The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek Study Guide

Kim Michele Richardson was born in northern Kentucky in 1957. In 1960, when she was three years old, her mother was declared an unfit parent. The state of Kentucky took Richardson and her three older sisters from their home, placing them in the Saint Thomas Saint Vincent Orphan Asylum, which was run by the Catholic Church. Richardson and her sisters spent seven years in the orphanage, during which time they suffered emotional, physical, and sexual abuse at the hands of the nuns and priests who ran the institution. When Richardson was 10, she and her sisters returned to their mother’s care. In 2004, she and one of her sisters were involved in a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of former orphanage residents who were abused. This experience prompted her to write and publish her first book, a memoir called The Unbreakable Child, in 2009. Richardson then turned to historical fiction with a local focus on Kentucky stories.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is set in the eastern Kentucky mountains during the final years of the Great Depression. The Depression was a severe, worldwide economic crisis that began in 1929. It caused a sharp drop in employment rates, wealth, and stability for many people. In the United States, the economy began to slowly improve starting in 1933, thanks in part to the New Deal program, which was created under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The New Deal combined a series of financial reforms and regulations designed to address monetary policy with a public works program designed create jobs. Its many agencies, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps, provided jobs for artists, writers, librarians, construction workers, firefighters, and foresters, among others. Despite the New Deal programs, the United States economy didn’t recover its pre-depression size until 1939. 1930s Kentucky was also the site of the “Harlan County Wars,” which were fought between coal mine operators and unionized miners in southeastern Kentucky. Coal was discovered in Kentucky in the late 18th century, and by the early 20th, coal had become one of the state’s primary commodities. Coal companies would establish mines, often in remote areas, then build up camps or towns around them and financially exploit their workforce. Miners also faced dangerous working conditions, from explosions and tunnel collapses to lung diseases from inhaling coal dust. Unionized coal miners in Harlan County trying to fight for better working conditions and pay ended up in a decade’s worth of hostilities with the powerful local coal companies. Finally, the novel’s protagonist, Cussy Mary Carter, is the last of the “Blue Carters,” a family with a rare blood disorder that tinges the skin blue. Her story fictionalizes aspects of the historical “Blue Fugate” family of Kentucky. In 1820, Martin Fugate and Elizabeth Smith, who both unwittingly carried the recessive gene for methemoglobinemia (a condition that means a person’s blood carries less oxygen and their skin accordingly has a blue color), married and settled in Hazard, Kentucky. Four of their seven children had blue skin. In their small community, intermarriages meant that the recessive gene become widespread and blue-skinned Fugate descendants continued to be born through the 1970s. The medical tests and discoveries made by Doc in the novel are drawn from a study of the Blue Fugates conducted by a hematologist in the 1960s.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is a book about the power of books in a harsh world. Of the many titles it specifically mentions, two are particularly important. The first is J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, which tells the story of Peter Pan, a boy who escaped growing up by fleeing to Never-Never Land. Peter represents the boundlessness and potential of childhood, and his story is especially poignant in a place and time where not all children do manage to grow up. The second is Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931. Set in early 20th century China, The Good Earth tells the story of a rural farmer and his family’s triumphs and tragedies. Wang Lung and his wife, O-Lan, provide a mirror for Kentucky homesteaders like Cussy Mary Carter and Jackson Lovett in their deep connection with the land, but also their struggle and poverty. Other novels by author Kim Michele Richardson touch on similar themes to The Book Woman, especially bigotry, hardship, and motherlessness. The Liar’s Bench, which follows the story of a Black Kentucky teenager who discovers her mother dead on her 17th birthday, deals with themes of bigotry and isolation. And GodPretty in the Tobacco Field engages with poverty and hardship in the lives of Kentucky coal miners and their communities as it follows RubyLyn Bishop, an orphaned girl taken in by her abusive uncle. Finally, both The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek and Jojo Moyes’ The Giver of Stars build their stories around the real-life history of the Pack Horse library project and the difficulty of life in rural Kentucky during the Great Depression. Because both books were released within a period of six months, concerns were raised in the literary community about potential plagiarism that were eventually dispelled. Moyes’ book focuses almost exclusively on the economic hardships of the era and the Pack Horse librarians, while The Book Woman also folds in the history of the Blue Fugates of Kentucky.