It was utterly AMAZING, full of ups, downs, twists, turns, upside downs, right side ups, crazy insane FUN!!! When the ride ended and we straightened out to glide back into the building to get out, all I could do was say, "Oh my cow, oh my cow, oh my cow!"
That is how I feel right now as I just moments ago finished book #24.
My mom, who is also in a Book Club in Kentucky, had this on her list of books for her club. Unfortunately for her (but fortunate for me!) she didn't enjoy it ~ and oddly enough she doesn't enjoy roller coasters either! ~ so she passed it on to me. It has sat here beside my bed for several months and since I decided to wait to read our next book for book club I picked this one to read. And I read all 385 in one week. It's that good.
So what about this calm serene cover with a pretty girl and a calm, scenic cabin in the woods makes this such a roller coaster ride? It begins,
"If my life were a book, no one would read it. People would say I was too boring, too predictable. A story told a million times. But I was perfectly content with my life--that is, until the pages of my story were ripped out before I had a chance to live happily ever after.
The end came, appropriately enough, at a funeral."
From there, in 1936 boring little Alice Grace Ripley from Blue Island, Illinois ends up in Acorn, KY, an old mining town as backwoods as she can imagine. She had been collecting books from the library she worked at (before she got laid off due to the Depression), and decided to deliver them herself via her loony aunt and uncle. This was a library set up through the WPA to help put people to work. There was one librarian (who ended up being a man) and four ladies who came a few times a week to deliver the books to people in the country who couldn't get out, thus called packhorse librarians. The second day she is there someone gets shot but not killed but they have to fake his death so the real person who shot him (who could be anybody!) doesn't come back to finish him off. This girl, who has had life handed to her on a silver platter has to learn how to cook on a woodstove, take care of and ride a horse, wash clothes in tub, take care of chickens and a rooster, plant a garden, make tonics and rubs with the help of a crazy but God loving 100 year old former slave the size of a twig. She meets another "flatlander" who is now a widow and taking care of her mother in law who is dying, a teenager (married) who gives birth to a colicky baby and is left alone to tend to baby and house while her husband goes off the find work, a pack of children who look forward to her visits as she reads Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberrry Finn. All the while still taking care of the supposedly dead man and trying to help him with his secrets. Throw in a 60 year old feud between nearly all the townsfolk, breaking into the abandoned mine twice, throw in a little love interest, and .. and .. well, how could anyone NOT love this book?!?!?
Alice Grace Ripley lives in a dream world, her nose stuck in a book. But happily-ever-after life
she's planned on suddenly falls apart when her boyfriend, Gordon,
breaks up with her, accusing her of living in a world of fiction instead
of the real world. Then to top it off, Alice loses her beloved job at
the library because of cutbacks due to the Great Depression.
Fleeing small-town gossip, Alice heads to the mountains of eastern Kentucky to deliver five boxes of donated books to the library in the tiny coal-mining village of Acorn. Dropped off by her relatives, Alice volunteers to stay for two weeks to help the librarian, Leslie McDougal.
But the librarian turns out to be far different than she anticipated--not to mention the four lady librarians who travel to the remote homes to deliver the much-desired books. While Alice is trapped in Acorn against her will, she soon finds that real-life adventure and mystery--and especially romance--are far better than her humble dreams could have imagined. (picture and description from amazon.com)
Fleeing small-town gossip, Alice heads to the mountains of eastern Kentucky to deliver five boxes of donated books to the library in the tiny coal-mining village of Acorn. Dropped off by her relatives, Alice volunteers to stay for two weeks to help the librarian, Leslie McDougal.
But the librarian turns out to be far different than she anticipated--not to mention the four lady librarians who travel to the remote homes to deliver the much-desired books. While Alice is trapped in Acorn against her will, she soon finds that real-life adventure and mystery--and especially romance--are far better than her humble dreams could have imagined. (picture and description from amazon.com)
O:)
Melissa
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