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What it argues
In Depression-era Kentucky, a group of women becomes part of Eleanor Roosevelt's Pack Horse Library project — riding mules and horses through mountain terrain to deliver books to isolated communities. The novel follows five women from very different backgrounds: Alice, a recent English bride who fled a suffocating marriage into the mountains; Margery, a fiercely independent local woman who built the library from nothing; Beth, a young woman from a respectable family escaping domestic expectations; Izzy, who lives with a physical disability and needs the library as much as the job; and Sophia, a Black librarian who rides despite the specific dangers facing her in 1930s Kentucky.
The book is fundamentally about what books mean to people who have never had access to them, and what it does to women to discover they can build something together. Moyes is interested in the specific texture of Appalachian mountain life — the poverty, the beauty, the insularity, the gender codes — and in how the library project disrupted those codes by giving women both employment and a reason to be elsewhere. The female friendship at the center of the novel is the real subject.
What it gets right
- 1.
The WPA Pack Horse Library project was real — between 1935 and 1943, librarians (mostly women) rode horses and mules through eastern Kentucky to deliver books to isolated mountain communities. Moyes honors that history while fictionalizing specific characters.
- 2.
The novel argues that access to books is a form of social power, and that denying it to women and poor communities is a form of control. The library becomes a vector for something larger than literacy.
- 3.
Sophia's presence in the narrative is handled with more care than is common in popular fiction — Moyes shows the specific and compounding dangers facing a Black woman in rural 1930s Kentucky without letting the white characters' solidarity obscure them.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Jojo Moyes is a British novelist and journalist who has written more than twenty novels, including Me Before You, After You, and Still Me. She is one of the few authors to have had two books simultaneously on the New York Times bestseller list. The Giver of Stars represents her first extended foray into historical fiction set in America. She is also a journalist who has written for The Independent. She lives in rural Essex with her family.
