I loved her brash disregard for the social niceties prized by so many of the upper-class residents of her town. Shannon: Marjorie was pretty great, wasn’t she? I really enjoyed getting to know her. Marjorie knocked my socks off harder than Alice did, though. This novel is about how she grows up into a woman with spine, nerve and values that matter to her – how she figures out how to fight, and a lot of readers will appreciate growing with her. I definitely didn’t pity her but she was so painfully sheltered and so painfully unprepared for both the wilderness of Kentucky and the notion of her husband’s world (even the physical realities of married life) that I couldn’t help but want to pat her on the head and tell her it was going to be all right.

How do you think all of this played into shaping Alice as a character?

She seemed to have lived a pretty pampered life before marrying into the Van Cleve family, but the social customs and societal expectations of Kentucky were vastly different from those she grew up with in England. As I read, I was constantly aware of how ill-prepared Alice was for her new existence. She’s new to married life, and also new to life in the U.S. Shannon: Alice is the story’s central character. Lisa: I knew absolutely nothing about the program (in spite of loving the Roosevelt ladies), so the book was a huge revelation to me! But now I want to know more about them. Did you have any prior knowledge about it before diving into The Giver of Stars? Shannon: I’ve read a bit about some of the programs Eleanor Roosevelt put in place during her time as First Lady, but the pack horse library initiative was something I knew very little about until earlier this year when I read Kim Michele Richardson’s fascinating novel The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. She knows her own worth, and as she and Alice begin to forge a friendship, Alice learns more than she ever thought possible about herself, the people who call Kentucky home, and what it really means to find a cause she can believe in.ĪAR reviewers Shannon and Lisa read Jojo Moyes’ latest novel, The Giver of Stars, and got together to share their thoughts on it. The leader of their little band of traveling librarians is Marjorie O’Hara, the daughter of an infamous bootlegger, determined to live life on no one’s terms but her own. So, when the call goes out for a group of fearless, charity-minded women to become pack horse librarians, delivering books to some of the most remote settlements in Kentucky, Alice jumps at the chance to get involved. Life as Bennett Van Cleve’s wife is not the fairytale she was led to believe it would be, and she is in desperate need of a cause to lose herself in.

In 1936, Alice Van Cleve, newly married to the son of one of Kentucky’s wealthiest and most influential coal miners, finds herself at loose ends.

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