Amazing story based on history
I won an e-copy of this book from BookishFirst. This is my unbiased and voluntary review.
This was an amazing book exploring the little known blue skinned people with congenital methemoglobinemia, who lived in remote Appalachian Kentucky during the Great Depression. Now thought to have immigrated from France and descendants of French Huguenots, they were considered "colored" only worse by the ignorant, and shunned so they were forced to intermarry. The author combines this with The Pack Horse Library Project, begun to provide jobs for women and reading material to the poor and isolated people of eastern Kentucky.
The fictional story is about nineteen year old Cussy Mary Carter, also known as Bluet, who lives with her father, a coal miner, who like many of the residents of the area are over worked and underpaid for very dangerous work leading to lung disease. Cussy, applies and gets a job as a librarian, where she is ridiculed and spurned by most of the townspeople of Trouble, Kentucky, but is held in high esteem by her patrons. Her father tried to marry her off, like he promised her mother he would, but she has no interest in these men, who are only after the deed to their property. After one disastrous marriage, her father lets her be, and she devotes and sacrifices herself to help the poverty stricken. But there is one man who sees beyond the color of her skin.
This was a beautifully written book. I highly recommend it.
This was an amazing book exploring the little known blue skinned people with congenital methemoglobinemia, who lived in remote Appalachian Kentucky during the Great Depression. Now thought to have immigrated from France and descendants of French Huguenots, they were considered "colored" only worse by the ignorant, and shunned so they were forced to intermarry. The author combines this with The Pack Horse Library Project, begun to provide jobs for women and reading material to the poor and isolated people of eastern Kentucky.
The fictional story is about nineteen year old Cussy Mary Carter, also known as Bluet, who lives with her father, a coal miner, who like many of the residents of the area are over worked and underpaid for very dangerous work leading to lung disease. Cussy, applies and gets a job as a librarian, where she is ridiculed and spurned by most of the townspeople of Trouble, Kentucky, but is held in high esteem by her patrons. Her father tried to marry her off, like he promised her mother he would, but she has no interest in these men, who are only after the deed to their property. After one disastrous marriage, her father lets her be, and she devotes and sacrifices herself to help the poverty stricken. But there is one man who sees beyond the color of her skin.
This was a beautifully written book. I highly recommend it.