The Librarian of Boone's Hollow
Lexington, Kentucky, 1936. Addie Cowherd has spent four years at Lees College dreaming of a quiet career writing novels, only to lose her university job when the Depression hollows out her father's grocery store and her tuition with it. To help her family, she signs on with the Works Progress Administration's Pack Horse Library Project and rides into Boone's Hollow, an isolated coal-mining settlement in the Appalachian mountains, where the locals are wary of outsiders, of women on horseback, and of any government program that smells of charity. Among the suspicious is Emmett Tharp, a young man home from college with no work and no clear future, whose path keeps crossing Addie's. Kim Vogel Sawyer weaves Addie's growing affection for her readers with Emmett's quiet faith journey, telling a Depression-era story about books reaching the people who need them most and about lives quietly remade by service.
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When the Depression closes the University of Kentucky library where she worked, Addie Cowherd takes a New Deal job riding for the Pack Horse Library Project in the coal town of Boone's Hollow. The locals do not trust outsiders, and a young coal miner already loves the librarian he grew up beside.
The Librarian of Boone's Hollow was written by Kim Vogel Sawyer and published in 2020. Sawyer is a Christian historical fiction author who has written more than 40 novels.
Yes. Like The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek (2019) and The Giver of Stars (2019), The Librarian of Boone's Hollow is built around the real Pack Horse Library Project of Depression-era Appalachia.
The Librarian of Boone's Hollow is 456 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Librarian of Boone's Hollow takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
The Librarian of Boone's Hollow is a standalone novel by Kim Vogel Sawyer, not part of a series.
The Librarian of Boone's Hollow is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
