Thoughts 
by Kim Michele Richardson, Sourcebooks 2019, 309 pages
Challenge: What’s in a Name 2022: Category Person with Description
Genre/Theme: Adult Fiction; history, pack horse library, blue people of Kentucky
Type/Source: Tradeback / Purchased at Half Price Books, I think
What It’s About: This story focuses on the last of the Kentucky blue people and how our protagonist worked to make her own journey in the world, as a Pack Horse Librarian, during the Depression. The story isn’t light – it contains disturbing violence, racism, and death. There are also tender moments and some humor.
Thoughts: I actually allowed myself to get swept away in this and it could be because I needed a hero to truly cheer for after a struggle with NightBitch, I’m not sure. It certainly is more plot and story and not the introspective contemporary snob-literature that I often find myself really falling for. I didn’t notice, for example, all the melodrama and the repetition of her being blue, over and over again until I read it in a review. Oh. Yeah, perhaps. Maybe it was all the references to pie. It surely gained it an extra slice on the rating for pie being a many-mentioned element.
And I also agree that the ending was … a bit much. Too much for only a few pages! WHAT JUST HAPPENED? Good thing I didn’t have a chance to go read reviews before I finished which is what happens when I have doubts mid-way. But I just kept trucking with the story until the last page.
“The first Friday in June, Troublesome always held its pie bake dance, a pie auction to hitch unmarried folks.”
page 60
Rating: Four slices of pie. Because of the pie and the fast flow.
“Winnie‘d been … the only one to bring a pie and sit with me one long Sunday, and then the next, reading to me while I recovered.”
page 73
Question: Will I read the second in the series? The Book Woman’s Daughter, published in May of this year. I don’t know. I’m not rushing out to get it, and I rarely read series books… I probably won’t, to be honest.
Care's Books and Pie 
Wow, I had never heard of the Kentucky blue people — isn’t human variation fascinating? I have kind of shifted away from reading books that are about book people because they are often… really smug? (I know that is mean to say.) But it doesn’t sound like this one loses into that too much, and I’m so glad you got swept away in it! The best feeling!
I hadn’t either. They were feared and discriminated against. OF COURSE. It’s funny how some books avoid my smug-gaze and some just bring it out. Just goes to show that ‘quality’ is subjective. (btw, don’t read The Lost Apothecary – that was one that really provoked me with its melodrama AND the fact that so many people LOVED it! #insertlaughingemojihere)
Books about book people are often smug. I think that’s the right word.
And perhaps, I give book people books a non-smug (anti-smug?) approach just because it is about books…. Hmmm.
Let people read what they want to read! No judging
oh, sure, we don’t want to attack our own tribe! Not in public, anyway