Book Archives - Oct to Dec 2022

A few liberties 

I took a few liberties with this story, conflating sight seeing features on Ellis and Liberty Island in NY harbor. 

This sequel to one of my March selections tracks the struggle for freedom waged by the underage daughter of legendary Blue Fugate and Pack Horse librarian, Cussy Mary Lovett. With her mom imprisoned in 1953 Kentucky for violating state miscegenation laws, the book woman’s daughter must keep one step ahead of a social services agent, a sheriff, and a wicked misogynist wife beater, all hell-bent on locking her up in a state labor camp until she’s twenty-one years old. 

Like a hot Appalachian summertime afternoon’s cold glass of lemonade that has some moonshine secreted in, this historical novel goes down smoothly, until it sneaks up and knocks you right out of your favorite reading chair. 

Ms. Richardson’s attention to the titular heroine, Honey Lovett, is sufficiently inclusive of all the women in the book’s femmesphere: her ancestors, her biological and adoptive parents, neighbors, friends, townspeople, and even her antagonizers who want her imprisoned. 

(You will want to read this book a second time, to isolate and track the growth and determined missions of several individual women in this femmesphere. Not all succeed fully within these pages, some even perish trying. You’ll have to decide if their fate amounts to as much freedom as they could possibly hope for, or at least achieve). 

Much like the serene and beautiful Appalachian countryside, which hides its deep treasure and curse of coal, Honey is reckoned innocent and naïve by her oppressors, who are left stunned by her fierce drive for freedom and her obstinance at being refused. Her thirst for justice is as unable to be denied as that of the young, widowed coal miner who bides her time for revenge, delivered at her prompting, as a fatal face-destroying rooster attack. 

The books cited as those Honey purposely picks to bring by muleback to patrons on her book route through the mountains are in part a tribute to Kentucky authors and in part provide readers of this novel significant and subtle insights into the recipients and the unfolding plot of the story. Ms. Richardson has essentially made books very appropriate foils and characters themselves in this book about books and their power to emancipate the mind, the body, and the soul. 

(c) 2022 Sourcebooks Landmark 

Back then

Twice within a few months during my undergraduate years I was told by acquaintances, who had not been around for a week or so, that they had to take time out for an abortion.

Some years later during the Clinton administration there was a debate about late-term abortions. This story was my effort to process these events and my emotions.

Abused. Terrified. Discovered pregnant. Discarded. Rejected by her parents. Shunned by her church. How do each of four women cope and survive? What do they do about their babies?

This historical novel set around Arlington Texas features two pairs of friends—Mattie and Lizzie in the early twentieth century and Cate and Laurel a hundred years or so later. Each of these four women draws us into her personal story of surviving the hardship of unjust treatment by family and society—but only to the extent her willingness, vulnerability, and daring allows. Ms Kibler engagingly depicts the landscape these girls/women navigate over two or three decades—geographic, architectural, social, familial, emotional, and spiritual.

At the historical heart of their story is a counter-cultural refuge founded in 1903 by Rev James Toney Upchurch and his wife Maggie Mae—The Berachah Industrial Home. Its signature hallmark was that it did not forcibly separate outcast mothers from their children. Over almost fifty years Berachah and its supporting benefactors provided safety and restorative nurture to nearly three thousand “erring and outcast girls”—prostitutes, addicts, unwed mothers, abused, raped and “ruined girls”—most with babies on the way or in tow.

The novel is populated with several significant supportive and other minor characters, who serve to humanize the trials of Maggie, Lizzie, Cate and Laurel. Personalities are left undeveloped or rounded out with an uneven hand—even among the four principals. Some reviewers have cited this as a shortcoming of Ms Kibler’s craft and a fault in the book. But I found it was more real-to-life, just as we involve ourselves to varying degrees and at different depths with the people we meet. I feel this aspect of the writing served to avoid a presentation of stereotypical portraits. It counterbalanced and underscored the rich dynamic at the heart of the story—the trepidation these four women faced to decide whether to reveal their secret pasts to one who had become, or was hoped to be, a trusted friend, who simultaneously allowed for the time and patience the other needed to make such a deeply personal revelation.

It is this dynamic that we readers can take away as an object lesson—either as fragile revealer or susceptible supporter—that lead me to choose Home for Erring and Outcast Girls for this October’s book selection.

(C) 2019 Crown / Random House