The title is a misnomer, as we don’t see many mountains in this historical women’s fiction. THE MOUNTAINS WE CALL HOME refers to the rugged life for cabin dwellers in Kentucky, caught between a meagre farm and mine work. However, having found out all about this 1930s life in the previous two books, we now explore the wider Kentucky of the 1950s.

To understand this story properly, you’ll need to have read at least THE BOOK WOMAN OF TROUBLESOME CREEK. We meet again with the primary character, stuck in a women’s prison. Cussy Lovett, a determined Packhorse Librarian bringing books to the hill dwellers, earned a respectable living and raised her status. She carries a blood condition that has the effect of making her skin blue. While her people were technically white, the jealous laws of her day forbade her to marry someone white or, presumably, someone who wasn’t white – it is confusing to think about. When a fine man married Cussy, willing to support her and the orphaned blue girl Honey she had adopted, the couple was arrested. Cussy picks up her story, which was partly told by Honey in the second book, The Book Woman’s Daughter.

The work is quite troubling and can be hard to read in one go. Continued examples of neglect, despair, and cruelty to women inmates will make the reader want to roll up her sleeves and sort out the situation. Clean water, soap, disinfectant, and bandages could not have been hard to come by, yet the men’s prison gets a budget increase while we’re told the women’s prison is on a shrinking and meagre budget. The geriatric women prisoners – I know – have bedsores. You’d have to wonder what was going through people’s heads to keep these women in jail.  

Cussy turns out to be a ray of hope, bringing literacy to the trapped women so they can read letters from family. Later in the story, we get to walk around the fine streets of Louisville and explore the good works of a Carnegie Library which serves all people who want to read. Anyone who values books, literacy, voting, and proper representation will appreciate the story we are being told. Cussy, showing us both sides of the picture, sees a harmful aspect to life that hadn’t really troubled her, for all the superstition and prejudice she knew on the mountains. THE MOUNTAINS WE CALL HOME concludes this family’s unusual tale and reminds us how far we have come, with an encyclopedia in our phone and an entire library in a small tablet. Kim Michele Richardson has far too few mules in this tale, but otherwise, she provides a worthy conclusion.