Cussy Mary’s impact on her community was substantial, being remembered well over a decade later. While Cussy Mary is absent in most of the novel, her presence is felt in the stories told about her and the memories held by those she helped when she lived and worked in the small town. In The Book Woman’s Daughter, Kim Michele Richardson tells the next chapter in the life of one of the most memorable fictional characters of the last few years: Cussy Mary Carter, Troublesome Creek’s Book Woman. Frightened and alone for the first time in her life, Honey will return to Troublesome Creek and, in walking the paths her mother blazed before her, she will find her own. She knows that Honey can hide there from the social workers determined to put Honey, a minor in the eyes of the law, into an orphanage that bears a striking resemblance to the Victorian workhouses of Charles Dickens time and novels. She sends Honey back into the Kentucky mountains to Troublesome Creek and the only remaining friends and family she has. Now the authorities have located the family, and Cussy Mary has a plan.
During most of that time, Cussy Mary, her husband Jackson Lovett, and their adopted daughter Honey, have been living in exile, hiding from the law that would incarcerate them because Cussy Mary and Jackson got married (it being against Kentucky law for a Caucasian man to marry a “blue” or colored woman). It has been almost 17 years since the events recounted in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. Now, in 2022, Richardson returns to tell the next chapter in Cussy Mary’s story, which actually belongs to her daughter, in The Book Woman’s Daughter. In 2019, Kim Michele Richardson told the story of Cussy Mary Carter and her work as a Pack Horse Librarian in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.
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