As a bibliophile, I appreciate any book about books, or librarians. The setting is the Kentucky coal mining region, at the end of the Depression. The son of the owner of the local mine has married Alice, an English lass, and brought her back to small town Kentucky to live. When the opportunity arises to become a packhorse librarian, she jumps at the chance, at least partially to have something meaningful to do. Alice, along with her fellow packhorse librarians, has to navigate not only the topography and weather of rural Kentucky, but also the prejudices and social mores of the time and place.
While this does a pretty good job of describing the job of packhorse librarian, which really was a job between 1935 and 1943 in Eastern Kentucky, thanks to the WPA, this would not be an appropriate book for younger readers. There is some violence, and “mature subject matter”. It does seem to give a pretty good description of the different social classes and attitudes that may have been prevalent. There are a few mentions of the impact of mining and the mining companies on the area, but that is not the focus of the book. The author is English, but apparently did quite a bit of local research for this book, so the descriptions of the travails of navigating the geography through different seasons feels accurate. The best part is getting to know the different personalities of the various librarians.
Although the pack horse librarians only operated in a short time span in a small area of the country, there are several books about them. “Down Cut Shin Creek” and “That Book Woman” would be appropriate for younger readers. Another title is “The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek”. I have not (yet!) read these books, but if you have ancestors from this region/time frame, you might want to look for them.
If this was your family, how would you research them? Alice was born in England, and then sailed to America with her new husband. Family Search should be able to provide a marriage record. They landed in New York, so Alice would have been processed through Ellis Island. Information on the ship they travelled on could be found on Ancestry. Even though she had married an American citizen, she would have had to go through the naturalization process, so that is another avenue of research. A search of local newspapers would be interesting, especially the social pages; the wife of the son of one of the principal citizens would probably be worth some ink! News articles would also give a sense of what was happening politically at the time.