Historical fiction transports you to another time and place. But only a good writer will be able to evoke the senses so well that you feel like you are living in a different world. Jojo Moyes manages that with ‘The Giver of Stars’.

In the book’s acknowledgments section, Moyes says The Giver of Stars is a labor of love, and that writing it was an unusual joy. Reading it brought a kind of pure joy that I hadn’t felt since the first time I read ‘The Good Earth’ by Pearl S Buck.

Set in small-town 1930’s Kentucky, the book is based on the real-life Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky, or the Horseback Librarian program as it was called then. The program delivered books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s traveling library and ran from 1935 to 1943, making books accessible to over 100,000 rural inhabitants.

Alice Wright, an Englishwoman, thinks marrying the handsome American Bennett Van Cleave will help her escape her suffocating life in England. She soon realizes that married life is not what she expected it to be. To make matters worse, there is her overpowering father-in-law interfering in everything. That’s when she comes across Roosevelt’s program to establish traveling libraries and volunteers for it.

Here, she meets the brave and independent Margery, who heads the initiative, and Beth, Izzy, Sophie and Kathleen, all headstrong women in their own rights. They each show Alice a side of life she has never seen. The women are all battling with their own issues and the program gives them a sense of purpose. It also helps them build better relationships with the townspeople as well as with each other, and to find some much-needed solace that way. Managing a library is also how they refuse to be brought down by men and how they think women need to be.

Despite the dangers of a challenging landscape and constant threats by men to stop prancing around in horses, the women are committed to delivering books to those who have never had books to read. By doing so, they manage to arm people with information they have never had. And that sometimes creates a lot of rift and tension that endangers the women’s lives as well.

I give this book five out of five stars. If I could, I would give it more. It has conflict, drama, purpose, friendship, and love; the story is tender, heartbreaking, funny, and reads like a thriller. Although a thick book, it will suck you right in and you will want to get to the end as quickly as possible.   

Fiction

The Giver of Stars

Jojo Moyes

Published: 2019

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Language: English

Pages: 437, Paperback