The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

I picked up Kim Michele Richardson's The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek because I had heard of the blue people of Kentucky, whose skin was blue as the result of a rare genetic condition (methemoglobinemia, as I learned in this book). I was intrigued that Richardson's protagonist had this disorder, and was not disappointed.

So. 

Cussy Mary Carter is the last of her (blue) people, widely feared and ostracized, though accepted for her role of carrying books to the isolated homesteads that dot the hills of Kentucky. She is a librarian with the Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, one of FDR's New Deal programs. Through her route, she comes to know her patrons - fire watchers, coal miners, moonshiners, the teacher of a one-room school, a chicken thief, and a mysterious stranger recently returned from building the Hoover Dam. All share a similar hardscrabble existence, scratching out a living, some literally, from the deep coal pits, where bosses have less regard for men than for mules (there are definitely echoes of The Devil Is Here in These Hills). 

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is incredibly well-researched, well-written, and beautifully constructed. Richardson captures the essence of Appalachia and the Great Depression; perhaps more impressively, in Cussy, she captures the loneliness and fear of being the last of her kind and creates a main character who the reader can't help but root for as she carries her books and hope into the hollows.

Five stars.

The Midwife of Hope River: A Novel of an American Midwife

In The Midwife of Hope River, Patricia Harman gives readers the story of fictional, Depression-er midwife Patience Murphy, who has arrived in the hills and hollers of West Virginia shortly before the market crashes and the mines begin to close. Quietly and steadily, Patience delivers babies across the hardscrabble region, where the ravages of man and mother nature are never far. (Jenny Lee has nothing on Patience Murphy...or the actual women who performed the acts Harman has ascribed to her fictional protagonist!)

Patience is the star of the book, along with her apprentice Bitsy and the local veterinarian, Daniel Hester, but Harman does a masterful job of incorporating the history of the miners' struggles, such that part of Midwife read like pages from The Devil Is Here in These Hills. The books reads easily, and quickly, with each chapter essentially the story of one more birth, though the entire story is woven together into a delightful whole.

Aspects of it reminded me of The Truth According to Us, with its tales of Depression-era life in tiny towns tucked into the mountains. Between the two, I found The Midwife of Hope River to be the richer read, and I'm looking forward to reading the sequel, Once a Midwife.

Five stars. 

The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

The Crazyladies of Pearl Street begins with the LaPointe family, six-year-old Jean-Luc (Luke), three-year-old Anne-Marie, and their (horribly ill-equipped) mother moving from rural New York to the slums of Albany at the height of the Great Depression. Actually, they've been summoned by their ever-absent husband/father, whose abandonment proves final when he never appears at the apartment he's rented them.

Throughout the next eight years, neighbors, teachers, friends, and relations come and go, moving the story (autobiographical fiction, according to the author's end note, which perhaps make this is an exaggerated memoir) forward in fits and starts. The pages and pages detailing Luke's "story games" definitely contributed to the fits. I kept waiting for something to happen, but really the story just floated along, the events no larger or more exciting than the minutiae of daily life. Harumph.

In addition to the limited action, I didn't particularly care for most of the characters, Jean-Luc's mother, Ruby, least of all. (I'll stop for a moment to say that while her parenting skills were abhorrent, I think I was irritated more than anything by the way Luke referred to her/how she referred to herself. I thought I'd scream if I read one.more.time. about her "famous French-and-Indian temper" and her hackneyed patterns of speech.) In any event, the most sympathetic of the cast is Mr. Kane, the Jewish proprietor of the corner store where Luke buys penny candies and the whole block places calls on the in-store pay phone. I could have used a little more of him.

Spanning the Great Depression and World War II, and told from the perspective of a rapidly maturing child, Crazyladies of Pearl Street has great potential, but is ultimately a little flat. If it were an actual memoir, it might remind have the lingering sweet notes of, say, The Situation in Flushing (could I offer higher praise??), but as it's clearly stated to be a fictional account, I expected a bit more, well, action. (And by this I mean that if an author were to create a "memoir" whole cloth, Lovers at the Chameleon Club is the way to go.) The best I can say is that Luke reminded me often of Elizabeth Gaffney's Wally (When the World Was Young), similarly making her way in a complicated world.

Lee Smith says that all stories take one of two forms: either somebody takes a trip, or a stranger comes to town. With Crazyladies, Trevanian (and, yes, I think it's weird that he's styled himself as a one-name author, the only other one that comes to mind being Homer - but I digress) has proven this wisdom more times than I can count.

The Truth According to Us

In the midst of the Great Depression, Layla Beck's father, the Honorable Senator from Delaware, cuts her off and she must go on relief. Fortunately for Layla, she has friends in high places and, unlike the millions standing in soup lines, she's able to quickly secure a job as a writer for the Federal Writers' Project. Promptly, she is shuttled off to little Macedonia, West Virginia, a far cry from her previous summer playground, Cape May.

Macedonia is, Layla quickly deduces, a hick town, with little of consequence. (It does not, however, have coal mines, for which is is at least minimally grateful.) Still she must write her book, and she throws herself into the task with gusto. As the weeks pass, her life becomes intertwined with the formerly proud but now fallen Romeyns, in particular shady Felix and his daughters Bird and Willa, as well as Felix's steady but odd siblings, Jottie, Mae, Emmett, and Minerva.

I *loved* the The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, of which Annie Barrows was one of two authors, and I wanted to love this. And I did love parts of it. The names, for example. Jottie. Willa. Bird. Felix. Also, the incorporation of the Federal Writers' Project, and some of the hilarious interactions between author and subject(s). Likewise, The Truth According to Us does a fine job of capturing the prettiness and pettiness of small-town America, and America teetering between the teeth of the Great Depression and the brink of World War II.

In the end, though, I couldn't help but feel a bit...meh. In part, I believe that's because the letter writing device, which worked to so well in Guernsey, seemed trite and tired here. A few pages chopped here and there wouldn't have hurt. The characters, too, felt overdrawn to the point of caricature and Willa, for whom I believe the reader is supposed to have the greatest felling, evoked a combination of contempt and pity from me. Mostly, though, I put that down to the ending, which, without giving anything away, left me disappointed. Barrows, it seemed, was about proving some larger "life lesson" than allowing the story to end as seemed most fitting. Or least as I deemed most fitting.

Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds

Harry Fukuhara was born in Washington and grew up in the idyllic little town of Auburn, the son of Japanese immigrants on the make. Life was perhaps a bit complicated – an older brother and sister were sent to live in Japan with extended family and never did quite settle back into the rhythm of American life upon their abrupt reentry, for example – but generally good. This changed dramatically when Harry’s father died in the midst of the Great Depression and his mother had to sell everything and move the family to Japan. To Hiroshima, I should add.

Harry hated Japan, longed for America, and finally returned in 1938. The America he encountered was a bit different from the one he’s left, particularly in regards to the treatment of anyone with a Japanese name, and particularly on the West Coast. Yet, as terrible as Harry’s timing may seem, it could have been worse, at least for a Japanese-American who longest for this country: shortly after Harry returned to the U.S., it became much, much more difficult to do so.

And so Harry settled into a somewhat tenuous existence, which he led right up until he was interred – along with his older sister and niece and thousands of other law-abiding Japanese whose crime, of course, was their ethnicity. Here Harry’s story becomes particularly interesting, for despite his anger and bitterness toward his current treatment, he volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army as a translator. Sometimes he interrogated prisoners. Sometimes he deciphered reeking, blood-splattered documents. Sometimes he waded ashore under enemy fire. And in the most improbable way, he encountered an enemy he knew in another life.

This story alone would be book-worthy enough, but while Harry slogged his way through the South Pacific, three brothers found themselves cogs of war in Imperial Japan. To say nothing of the whole atomic bomb bit. And the fact that, after the war, he rose to become one of the highest ranking military officials in Japan, and certainly the highest counterintelligence official. 

All of which makes Midnight in Broad Daylight a fascinating – and chilling – read. Pamela Rotner Sakamoto has captured the essence of two cultures, as well as the inexorable march of time and conflict and the political process. She sprinkles a liberal helping of Japanese terminology throughout the book so that the reader, too, is constantly pulled between Japan and America, Japanese and English. Most critically, Sakamoto appears to write without judgment. She presents the issues from multiple vantage points, letting readers feel the individual and collective dilemmas of the time. In that way, this book is similar to Flyboys, in which James Bradley succeeds in creating a wholly objective portrait of the war in the Pacific. There’s no question, though, that Sakamoto’s portrait is more personal, and perhaps more searing. (It is certainly less grisly, which is my only complaint about Bradley’s work.)

Above all, Midnight in Broad Daylight is a book to make the reader think. About the lives each of us has lived, from the stranger on the bus to the neighbor three doors down. About loyalty and resiliency. About how life is so seldom black-and-white, right-and-wrong. About the human lives impacted by government decree, and about how capricious it all is.

The Cape Ann

Lark Erhardt is six-years-old in 1938, a young girl struggling to make sense of the grown-up world around her in the midst of a the Great Depression. She lives with her parents in a single room at the train depot, where her father works - steadily, unlike many in small-town Minnesota in this time - but she dreams of the day her family with leave the depot behind and build their own home, a Cape Ann, a dream of a house with hollyhocks and a window seat.

Little Lark is the consummate worrier, principally over her upcoming first confession. She worries, too, about her mama, Arlene, whose constant rows with the hard-gambling Willie hang over the family like a dark cloud. She also must make sense of her Aunt Betty, whose domestic situation is far more precarious than Lark's, and her friend Hilly Stillman, a World War I veteran - and hero - suffering from shell shock two decades on.

Faith Sullivan writes beautifully and brings depth and dimension to every character in the novel. Writing from the perspective of a six-year-old is undoubtedly a challenge; I found it took some getting used to for the reader, but ultimately Sullivan's skill as a writer brings a sense of authenticity to The Cape Ann that many books with an older narrative never achieve.

Three-and-a-half stars.

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

I was somewhat dubious as to whether an 80-year-old story about rowing could capture and hold my attention. I shouldn't have been: one of the more memorable books I read in the past year was The Great Match Race, which is about horse racing, for heaven's sake. Moreover, throughout Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown, like Match Race author Eisenberg, does a commendable of providing the larger context. The hardship of life is never far from the athletes' - or reader's - mind: these were the years in the heart of the Depression, the years of Hoovervilles and Okies - the term "Dust Bowl" was coined in the middle of the boys' rowing career, in 1935.

What Brown does exceptionally well is select one of the boys, Joe Rantz, and make Boys in the Boat, as much a biography of Rantz - whose story is amazing and inspiring - as a retelling of the quest for Olympic gold. Rantz is the heart and soul of the book; the hardships he faced and the genial way in which he faced - and overcame - them is such that the reader is drawn in immediately. I couldn't help but be sympathetic to the lonely, and ultimately abandoned, boy determined to make something of his life despite extraordinarily long odds. I was rooting for Joe long before I was rooting for the rest of his boat mates.

If there's any criticism of Boys in the Boat, it would be that the sections on 1930s Nazi Germany in the build up to the Olympics sometimes feel forced. Unlike the Deparession-era hardships which are woven neatly throughout the entire story, events in Germany are recounted in separate sections. This is probably necessary, as the rise of anti-semitism and embrace of the Olympic movement as propaganda cannot be woven into the protagonists' lives, but it does break up the flow of the Joe Rantz-University of Washington crew story.

This is a minor criticism, though, and all-in-all, The Boys in the Boat is an outstanding read. Four stars.

Under a Dark Summer Sky

In the summer of 1935, residents in Heron Key, Florida, are just trying to get by. Years now into the Great Depression, and entrenched within the rules and rituals of the Jim Crow South, black and white residents alike find themselves on edge as the sweltering heat and oppressive humidity bear down on them, a hurricane blowing hard at sea - and straight toward them. Yet, as unprepared as the "Conchs" are, there is another group, just to the outskirts of town, many of whom literally do not know the meaning of a hurricane. This group is comprised of World War I veterans, down on their luck but hard at work, many for the first time in years, building a bridge that will soon connect one key to the next. Tensions between the locals - black and white - and between the locals and the veterans come to a head when a local, white woman is found beaten almost beyond recognition and the sheriff is pressured to finger a killer or allow the town to enact its own justice.

I sped through Vanessa Lafaye's book one rainy afternoon recently. She captures the essence of the 1930s and, especially, of the Jim Crow South, perfectly. The characters' dialogue, as well as their relationships with one another, are such that this book can only be set in one time and place. As with The Help, with few exceptions the black characters tend to be the most sympathetic, and Lafaye seems to take especial pleasure in seeing that the most offensive of the characters receive their just dues. (Given that the historical note at the beginning explains that the 1935 Keys hurricane was the most powerful to ever strike North America - and that it struck a bitty backwater in the midst of the Depression - just dues is something that more than a few - deserving and undeserving alike - received.)

This is the second book I've read about a hurricane recently: The Promise is set during the 1900 hurricane in Galveston. There, the main characters find themselves alone on an isolated farm when the storm comes; here, the characters are sheltered in large groups. It's hard to decide which was more terrifying. It's equally hard to decide which is the "better" book, and in the end, I don't think I will. Under a Dark Summer Sky is wonderfully written and deeply complex. Anyone who loves good writing and good story telling will enjoy this glimpse into the past.

Letters from Hillside Farm

Letters from Hillside Farm is another of the books I picked up at the conference this past summer. The book, written by Jerry Apps, is the story of the fictional Struckmeyer family who moves from Cleveland to a Wisconsin farm during the heart of the Great Depression. Their story is told through the letters 12-year-old George writes to his grandmother back in Cleveland - and her responses to him. To be sure, this is no Worst Hard Time. In fact, and I admit this rather sheepishly, I got about 20 pages into the book (which is only 150 pages) before I realized that this is primarily a children's book - probably aimed at the 12-year-old set.

Nevertheless, I continued for two reasons: 1) Apps does a nice job of bringing farm living, and small town Americana in general, during the 1930s to life. It was fun to read about traveling circuses and one-room schoolhouses regardless of the fact that I've done so many times in the past. 2) This book reminded me why I first loved to read, and why that love has continued through the years. In that sense, it was escapist reading more than even something like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer - another book best enjoyed by the middle school set.

Would I read Letters from Hillside Farm again? No. But, I don't regret finishing it the first time.

The Worst Hard Time

The Worst Hard Time is the gritty story of the Dust Bowl that gripped the Plains in the 1930s. Like my friend Clio, whose own review convinced me I should add this book to my list, I was largely ignorant of the scope and magnitude of the Dust Bowl. Yes, it was very hot and dry and caused many people, like the famous Okies in The Grapes of Wrath, to head for California. I had never known or imagined, however, that in the areas most badly afflicted (and Steinbeck's migrants did not hail from the worst afflicted parts), when it rained, which it seldom did, the clouds dropped mud from the sky. Cattle and farm animals suffocated on the dust, scores of children and the elderly died of dust pneumonia, and a single storm could bring enough dust to bury an entire Model A Ford. Other storms were capable of traveling thousands of miles, flinging dirt onto the Capitol building in Washington, DC, and even onto ships hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic.

Timothy Egan does a masterful job of bringing these anecdotes to life and of introducing the reader to the individuals who lived in the Dust Bowl and helping us understand why they left or, harder to grasp, why they stayed. Egan also concisely explains the causes behind the Dust Bowl. These causes are a hard lot to follow. There are, of course, the railroads and railroad barrons, but more disturbingly is the federal government. Egan does not sugar coat that it was the federal government, in a fit of manifest destiny, that encouraged more and more settlers to take to the plains, to plow up the grass, to plant more wheat than the country needed, to take on ever greater debt, and so on, until it all collapsed with the onset of the Great Depression.

After years of indifference during the 1930s, the federal government finally took action, buying millions of acres of dusty fields to return to grass. Under the Civilian Conservation Corps, they also planted some 220 million trees in an attempt to anchor the land to itself. Today, Egan notes that "some of the land is still sterile and drifting," and a colleague in Colorado informs me that the devastating fires sweeping through her state are kindled in no small part by the trees that were planted during the Depression.

Overall, this is an incredibly interesting and well-written book, one that I would especially recommend for history buffs or avid readers. It's one of two books I loaded onto my mom's Nook before she left for Europe earlier this week, so I hope she'll enjoy it as well!

The Food of a Younger Land

The Food of a Younger Land provides a fascinating glimpse back in time to the American of the 1930s (and earlier). The book, which is comprised primarily of original, unpublished manuscripts collected as part of a WPA project in the late 1930s and early 1940s (last submissions: December 11, 1941) is essentially a glimpse of what and how Americans ate in the opening decades of the 20th century. The impetus for the government collecting this information - and the project lasted for nearly a decade, beyond the whole Great Depression thing, was the appearance of bottled salad dressings in grocery aisles. As Mark Kurlansky, who really did a wonderful job of stitching piles of 70-year-old papers into a highly readable book, writes in his introduction: “What could better spell the beginning of the end than the manufacture of bottled salad dressing, a product that was so easy to make at home?”

In 1930s America, Italians ate ravioli and Mexicans ate tacos and these foods needed to be described in detail for anyone else. Ravioli, by the way, are “diminutive derbies of pastry, the crowns stuffed with a well-seasoned meat paste,” or at least that is how the WPA writer described them in the late 1930s. Also, tourists in Virginia who do not find the “Virginian foods” along the highway are advised to “knock at some farmhouse door, register [their] complaint against American standardization, and be served after a manner that conforms to the ancient rules of hospitality.” As Kurlansky notes, if that instruction isn’t evidence that this book is about a different country as much as different foods, I don’t know what is.

Given what people in this earlier version of America ate, it’s amazing they didn’t all die of coronary disease at age 35 (of course, I suppose one could make the same argument today)... Primarily, they ate meat and they ate corn. Baked, fried, broiled, and barbecued, they started with hearty helpings of country ham in the morning, plates of fried chicken at noontime, and slabs of beef at night. That, of course, is when they weren’t eating squirrel, possum, rabbit, bison, duck, venison, the intestines of any and all animal, or my personal favorite, beaver tails. Also beans, biscuits, and the omnipresent corn, as a vegetable, a bread, or often a gruel. Whatever Oregon Trail taught me, I wouldn’t have made a good pioneer.

If you’re curious about an earlier era in American history or how cuisine has evolved, I definitely recommend this book. The heartiest might even try a recipe or two (potato salad or breads most likely, unless you fancy trying your hand at pheasant or beaver, though I personally recommend against it). Seeing that I’m not much better in the kitchen than I would have been as a pioneer, I’ll stick to reading the recipes myself.