The Book Woman's Daughter: A Novel

Very good book. I enjoyed the first book as well. Before reading, I knew nothing about the blue people of Kentucky. After reading the first book, I looked it up and was surprised by what I found.
I was hoping to read about Cussy coming home and Honey dating Francis. Maybe she’ll write a third addition?

April 2025

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek was such a unique and interesting historical novel and has really stuck with me, so I was excited to read the sequel. Unfortunately it really wasn’t as good as the first one. The plot was a little too predictable and the characters were underdeveloped.

This is the second novel of the series, and is about the small blue child that Cussy saves at the end of the first novel. Beginning with a grave injustice, the story follows Honey as she must overcome hardships, racism, and the law in order to gain her freedom. Full of strong women overcoming hardships in a man's world, it is also a story of sisterhood & the bonds women share in this crazy world.

The Book Woman’s Daughter gave me a piece of Appalachian history I wanted to know more about. Though, this was a reading experience I struggled to enjoy. Kim Michele Richardson explores literacy, racism, sexism, poverty, and female independence through sixteen-year-old Honey Lovett’s fight to build a life on her own terms. I found so much value in the story. I only wish I had connected with the way Richardson told it. I should start with an important mistake on my part. I have not read The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. I strongly recommend reading it before picking up its sequel. Honey is the daughter of Jackson Lovett and Cussy Mary Carter, the blue-skinned packhorse librarian from the first novel. Their history shapes Honey's entire life. Characters, relationships, and back stories often felt established long before I met them in the sequel. I spent too much time trying to understand why certain people mattered instead of experiencing the impact Richardson clearly intended the side characters to carry. Honey’s parents are arrested because Kentucky law prohibits their interracial marriage. They leave their sixteen-year-old daughter vulnerable to becoming a ward of the state. Honey returns to Troublesome Creek and takes up her mother’s work delivering books to families scattered throughout the Appalachian mountains. Her fight for independence soon becomes larger than simply supporting herself. She is a young woman living in a society determined to decide where women belong, who deserves legal protection, and which people are allowed to hold power. I admired Honey's refusal to accept marriage as the easiest solution to her legal problems. Honey is surrounded with women working jobs and occupying spaces society considered inappropriate for them. Female miners, fire lookouts, librarians, and mountain women create a community where women protect one another because the systems surrounding them frequently do not. The history of the area interested me just as much as Honey's story did. I knew about the blue people of Kentucky before reading this book, but I had never encountered their history through fiction. The discrimination towards them is connected with the broader racial hierarchies of the 1950s. Laws could easily be used to control families whose outwards existence challenged social hierarchies. I grew up in Texas and witnessed racism in the 1990s that was far less distant than history books sometimes make it appear. A black man and his white wife were harassed out of my middle class neighborhood because people objected to their marriage. My personal experiences made the discrimination in Honey’s world feel uncomfortably close. My adoptive mother was born in 1952, only a year before Honey’s journey takes place. Reading about the laws, expectations, prejudices, and limitations surrounding women and minorities gave me another perspective on the world that shaped my own mother's generation. People who grew up under these systems are still part of our communities. Understanding that history is important because internalized prejudice does not disappear when laws change. This story captures how literacy can disrupt systems built around keeping people powerless. Honey carries books into isolated communities, but she is delivering more than entertainment. Education gives people information, possibility, and access to worlds beyond the mountains surrounding them. I enjoyed watching Honey use the same work that defined her mother to claim ownership of her own future. My fascination with the history could not overcome my disconnect with the writing. The prose frequently felt laborious and textbook-like. Historical information sometimes seemed presented for instruction rather than woven naturally into Honey’s life. Scenes that should have carried tremendous impact moved slowly enough that my attention wandered. I appreciated what I was learning more than I enjoyed reading about it. My disconnect from the writing shaped my entire experience with The Book Woman’s Daughter. This story introduced me to Appalachian history I now want to explore further. Honey represents the independence and determination I want to see in fictional heroines. Pick this up if you are interested in women’s history, Appalachian culture, literacy, the blue people of Kentucky, and stories about women challenging restrictive social systems.