Inspired by Eleanor Roosevelt’s WPA Pack Horse Library Project (Kentucky 1937) this book has us traveling back in time. Baileyville, is a make-believe place but it feels as if it exists. Moyes has filled the spaces in the novel with description of colourful lives and vast mountain scenes plus the minutia detail of plants and animals season to season. we are fully part of this story place as a reader discovers the heartache, triumphs, loneliness and secret loves of five incredible women.
England, late 1930s, and Alice Wright a restless, stifled young lady of a well-to-do family makes an impulsive decision to marry a wealthy American, Bennett van Cleve. She leave her home and family behind. But stuffy, disapproving Baileyville, Kentucky, where her husband favours work over his wife, and is dominated by his overbearing father, is not the adventure, nor the escape she had hoped for. Until that is, she meets Margery O’Hare the daughter of a notorious felon and a troublesome woman the town wishes to forget. Margery’s on a mission to spread the wonder of books and reading to the poor and lost, and she needs Alice’s help.
The Giver of Stars hits on big, important themes: understanding mountain people as victims of circumstances – economics, illiteracy, domestic abuse, sexism, alcoholism, long-held feuds. Others egregiously affected by power, money, and the dangers of coal-mining, with little hope of earning an income except for local farming and selling home-made, illegal, and potent liquor, moonshine. Contrary to stereotypes of Appalachia as white, coal-miners were also black, so racism also reveals its injustices. there is a lot to love about this novel and Moyes doesn’t leave us still for long with a great pace of adventure and sprinkle of romance.
Book carriers in Hindman, Kentucky
Works Projects Administration [Public domain]
Oak Tree and Stars by BlueFalcon1983 