Book Review: Troublesome Creek

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, by Kim Michele Richardson

About halfway through this intense, thoughtful novel, I had the thought that it may be one of the best books I have ever read.

Then it got better.

So, before I go any further, let me urge you to go out and buy this book. Or borrow it from your local library. Just go read it.

The book explores two issues, one that I was familiar with, and the second I was unaware of but happy to learn about. The book's protagonist, Cussy Mary Carter, is one of the Blue Fugates of Kentucky, mountain people who because of a rare blood condition and much inbreeding, had blue skin.To help survive in the rugged environment of Eastern Kentucky, Cussy joins the Pack Horse Library project, a WPA program that delivered books to the isolated people in the area. (I had heard about the Fugates: I was unaware of the Pack Horse project.)

Martin Fugate moved from France to the Troublesome Creek area of Hazard County, Ky., around 1800. Against all odds, he married a Kentucky woman who carried the same rare recessive gene as he did -- one that lacked a critical enzyme in the blood, causing it to have a chocolate-brown color, which in turn made the skin appear blue. Because of their isolation, members of the family married and had children with each other. This resulted in the recessive gene occurring more frequently, resulting in the condition later identified as methemoglobinemia. (I tried to find a photo of a family member online, but none seemed legitimate. They were either falsely colored, exploitative, or not a member of the Fugate clan.)

President Franklin Roosevelt created the The Pack Horse project as part of the Works Project Administration in 1935. It was meant to bring books to the schools and isolated cabins in Appalachia. It hired mostly women, and a few men, to walk or ride horses or mules across the rugged land. The people receiving the books were grateful for both the visitors and reading material, which they otherwise would do without.

But I digress. Back to the book.

Cussy Mary lives in a two-room cabin in an  almost inaccessible holler near Troublesome Creek. Her only human companion is her father, a coal miner suffering from black-lung disease, who is eager to marry her off before he dies. He is active in the efforts to organize the miners, a dangerous position to take in Hazard County in the 1930s. Cussy is a blue woman, perhaps the last of her kind. She is sometimes called Bluet, because her color resembles a wildflower that grows near her home in the Appalachian mountains.

As fictional characters, Cussy and her father are used to give a primer on the poverty in the Eastern Kentucky mountains, and the effect it has on the people of the area. It shows the devastating impact mining coal has had on the beauty and health of the natural surroundings, and on the community.

It shows the barriers Cussy must face because of her color, her gender, and her isolation. For instance, in one anecdote, she is forced to obey the hastily hung "no coloreds" sign in the restroom of the library room where she picks up the books and magazines for the people along her Pack Horse route. Richardson captures how the books she delivers show how Cussy's world, and the world of her neighbors, is sometimes beyond their ken.

"'Aeroplanes and trains,' I said to Angeline. ... 'The world's getting so big, Bluet. Makes a feller feel too small,' Angeline barely whispered. 'It's growing too fast. Right when you're looking smack at it, but you hain't really seeing it neither. Hain't natural.' She tilted her head down toward the dirt, plugging her toes into the earth as if to root herself from being carried off."

The writing is extraordinary, as the above illustrates. It's vivid and sensitive, filled with descriptive phrases. Richardson reaches perfection in her use of dialect -- just the right amount to give flavor to the speech of the people, but not too much that it appears mocking, is annoying, or hard to understand. Richardson has a keen ear.

She also has a keen heart and mind, pulling us in to watch her characters live their lives, allowing us to feel empathy and a certain kinship, even though their circumstance are far different in time and place to our own. 

Book Review: Ghost Mine

Ghost Mine: by Hunter Shea

This post is part of a blog tour leading up to the publication of the book on May 30. I received a copy of the book for participating in the tour.

Ghost Mine is a scary little book, chock full of weird characters spilling over with wickedness and villainy, evil happenings beyond the imagination of most men, and places of darkness and horror that make your worst nightmares seem like a sunny field of flowers.

It is the fight between good and evil, of men and women against a literal devil, in a battle that could only be conceived in the mind, because it is too horrible to exist in any world we know. Yet there are also good men and women, willing to risk their very souls for others. There is friendship and camaraderie, love and tenderness, and trust and togetherness.

Hunter Shea calls himself the "product of a misspent childhood watching scary movies, reading, and wishing Bigfoot (who receives a mention in Ghost Mine) would walk past his house." He is the author of more than 25 books, including two series. He writes thrillers, horror, the paranormal, and is proud that his books are on display at the International Cryptozoology Museum. 

While I enjoy a good scare as well as the next person, I must admit I was a little leery reading the background and synopsis of this novel. I feared an over-the-top slasher/horror fest.

I was wrong.

What I read was a thoughtful exploration of fear and the afterlife, a look at how terror can exist on another level, and perhaps cross over into our world. It's a look at religion and death, and how we fit them into our existence.

The book, which is set in the early 1900s, during the term of President Theodore Roosevelt, has a small cast of characters. There's Nat Blackburn, an old-time cowboy and mercenarie, who fought with Roosevelt and his Rough Riders. There's Teta, who has ridden and fought alongside Blackburn. 

After a few introductory chapters introducing the characters and setting the stage -- which has Roosevelt sending Blackburn and Teta out west to find out why men, including U.S. troops, are disappearing in the small Wyoming mining town of Hecla. The copper mines were previously booming, and rumors spread that gold was discovered, but then all went quiet. Anyone sent out there never returned.

As the two men visit the area and their adventure begins, Blackburn and Teta eventually come across others who join them in their quest. They all play important roles in the story. Shea gives us no extraneous characters. 

Indeed, it's a tightly written book. Shea gets into a scene, and gets out. As each character is integral to the plot, each word he chooses is perfect for the sentence, and each sentence, paragraph, and chapter is essential to the plot. 

I like a writer who doesn't waste words. Shea is that writer.

Book Review: It Couldn't be Done

They Said it Couldn't be Done, by Wayne Coffey

One of the drawbacks of reading history --especially the history that you can remember -- is that you know how it ends. But in the case of the World Champion 1969 Mets, that's a good thing.

Sportswriter Wayne Coffey returns to "the most astounding season in baseball history," according to the subtitle of his book. He recreates the story of the Amazing Mets, who in their first season seven years earlier had set a record for futility. But with a '69 team of some fine young ballplayers, coupled with a few grizzled veterans, all playing under the leadership of the incomparable Gil Hodges, the New Yorkers rose from the depths of despair to the top of the baseball world in the last year of the 1960s.

"More than a anything, in the same summer that two men walked on the moon, 400,000 men and women descended on a farm in the Catskill Mountains, and millions more all over the county were embroiled in a conflict about the war in Vietnam, the Mets embodied hope," Coffey writes. "They embodied possibility -- a belief that things could get better and would get better."

He tells their story by rewinding the season and its most important games, interspersed with vignettes of the people involved. Some stories are well known to any Mets' fan: How a small-town stadium usher in Iowa discovered the best left-handed pitcher in team history and alerted a Mets scout. How the Franchise, Hall-of-Famer Tom Seaver, came to the team after Atlanta signed him out of season, and the Mets -- one of only three teams willing to match the Braves' offer -- saw then-commissioner William Eckert pick their name out of a hat.

Others tales are of the fans and behind-the-scenes people -- the batboys and school boys who skipped school, the statistician and travel managers who kept the records and got the team where they were going, and the Broadway stars who sang and the New York mayor who won an upset re-election because of the team's success.

But perhaps the best are the backstories of the four African Americans on the team, who grow up in the Jim Crow era in the deep south, and lived to tell about it. Take Donn Clendenon, for example, who entered Morehouse College and was assigned Martin Luther King Jr. as his mentor. The pair struck up a lifelong friendship, and when King was assassinated in 1968, Clendenon was instrumental in persuading Major League baseball to postpone the beginning of its season for a few days while King's funeral took place.

Several of those stories are told in the latter pages of the book, which describe and narrate the games of the playoffs and World Series. Each game is given one or more chapters, and the details are exacting and told with the thrill of the mid-October classic. For Met fans of a certain age (that would include me) it's a trip down memory lane and a chance to re-live one of the best moments of the best time of your life.