Review: The Giver of Stars

The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A novel about the Kentuckian packhorse librarians of Eleanor Roosevelt's WPA library project, The Giver of Stars tells the story of women whose lives were changed by their opportunity to work during the Depression era. Earning twenty-eight dollars a month, librarians delivered books into the remote hollers of Kentucky, enriching the lives of residents, some of whom could barely read when the project began. Central character Alice Wright is a bored British woman who leaves her life in Surrey after meeting handsome Bennett Van Cleve. She thinks she is moving to a life in glamorous America but in fact ends up feeling alienated in Baileyville, a small Kentucky mining town, living in her father-in-law's home with her husband and what feels like the claustrophobic presence of her deceased mother-in-law to whom she is constantly held in comparison. Unable to make her own home, since her father-in-law wants everything preserved as his wife left it, Alice Van Cleve begins to look outward and seizes the opportunity to join the ranks of a newly formed packhorse library with the likes of iconoclast Margery O'Hare. It's a life-changing move and not just for Alice, but for Margery, who becomes more open to friendship and trust, but to others in the library service like Izzy Brady, Beth Pinker, and Sophia Kenworth, a black librarian from Louisville who has returned home to care for her brother William, who was injured in a mining accident. The owner of the mine, none other than Alice's evil father-in-law Gideon Van Cleve, tries all manner of unscrupulousness to control those in Baileyville, but some, like Fred Guisler, who donated space for the library, and Sven Gustavsson, a mine security officer who is in love with Margery, cut their own path in the community.

The Giver of Stars marks something of a departure for British author Jojo Moyes and comparisons to the May 2019 book The Bookwoman of Troublesome Creek by author Kim Michele Richardson have been as fast and furious as they were inevitable. The Bookwoman of Troublesome Creek, a years-long well-researched labor of love by Richardson, an American author, went into first drafts in 2016, but is not even the first novel on the Kentucky book women to be published in 2019. (The first was Where Green Meets Blue by Corinne Beenfield, which I've not yet read.) The broad similarities between Richardson's and Moyes' books - both feature black librarians, both feature an attack on a packhorse librarian, and both feature poignant deaths of story-loving terminally ill library patrons (in Richardson's novel a malnourished child and in Moyes' novel a miner dying of black lung)- have posed a lot of questions. I'm not sure as a reviewer that I can comment beyond saying there are still differences in the story, though it stings that Moyes, the better-known writer, already has her novel optioned for film, while Richardson worries her beautiful book will be forgotten. Readers should read both books. While my ratings might reveal a personal preference, both are very good books with different strengths. It is true, however, that there are notable similarities in the stories and that Richardson's novel was available in DRCs long before Moyes. Readers looking for more info on comparisons that have been questioned between these two books can read this article: "Me Before You" Author Jojo Moyes Has Been Accused Of Publishing A Novel With "Alarming Similarities" To Another Author's Book

I received a Digital Review Copy and paper review copy from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review.

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