The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek(2019) by Kim Michele Richardson

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek (2019) 

by Kim Michele Richardson

Sigman Road, Troublesome Creek, Kentucky

Kentucky: 8/16

   During the Work Projects Administration, the Federal Government paid women to schlep library books into the hollows of Kentucky.  Also, in Kentucky there was a family of "Blue People"- the Fugates, who due the chance marriage of a French immigrant to a local girl, inherited a recessive genetic trait that caused their skin to turn blue from a lack of oxygen in the blood.  The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek combines these two true stories into a single novel about a woman- called Bluet, who is the last, blue-skinned woman of her kind, and works for the WPA as a book woman.   Truly, author Kim Michele Richardson stuck some kind of thematic alchemy with her combination of the two subjects, making The Book Woman uncommonly affecting for a book of this type. 

  Most notably was her classification as a "colored' person alongside the only African American woman in the valley.  This part of the book seemed a little far-fetched, since I've made through the entire deep south with many not black but not white characters and it seems like a blue skinned woman of EUROPEAN ancestry would not be classified as "colored."  To me, that sounds more like a definition you would have come across in the urban north, where groups like the Irish and Italians were commonly discriminated against and referred to as non-white, in spite of their European ancestry.