15. The Boxcar Librarian by Brianna Lusbuskes

listened on Audible (purchased)

464 pgs. (13:20)

2025
Adult Historical Fiction
Finished 3/31/25
Goodreads rating: 4.17
My rating: 4.5
Setting: Early 20th century Montana

My comments: Three points of view:  1930s Millie, 1920s Alice, 1910s Colette, all coming together in the end.  The story is set in Montana in various small towns and cities.  It is Alice's vision to have a library in a boxcar that travels from lumber camps to mining sites throughout Montana.  Conditions are super hard for the working men, and "the company" is the royal ruler of all.  Colette's father is a miner and a union man. Alices's father is an extremely rich mayor and supporter of "the company."  Millie is an orphan from Texas who now works in Washington DC and comes to observe the group of people that are writing a travel summary for the government.  Once I began to easily tell the three women's voices apart the story became quite fascinating.

Goodreads synopsis:  Inspired by true events, a thrilling Depression-era novel from the author of The Librarian of Burned Books about a woman’s quest to uncover a mystery surrounding a local librarian and the Boxcar Library—a converted mining train that brought books to isolated rural towns in Montana.

When Works Progress Administration (WPA) editor Millie Lang finds herself on the wrong end of a potential political scandal, she’s shipped off to Montana to work on the state’s American Guide Series—travel books intended to put the nation’s destitute writers to work.

Millie arrives to an eclectic staff claiming their missed deadlines are due to sabotage, possibly from the state’s powerful Copper Kings who don’t want their long and bloody history with union organizers aired for the rest of the country to read. But Millie begins to suspect that the answer might instead lie with the town’s mysterious librarian, Alice Monroe.

More than a decade earlier, Alice Monroe created the Boxcar Library in order to deliver books to isolated mining towns where men longed for entertainment and connection. Alice thought she found the perfect librarian to staff the train car in Colette Durand, a miner’s daughter with a shotgun and too many secrets behind her eyes. 

Now, no one in Missoula will tell Millie why both Alice and Colette went out on the inaugural journey of the Boxcar Library, but only Alice returned.

The three women’s stories dramatically converge in the search to uncover what someone is so desperately trying to what happened to Colette Durand.

Inspired by the fascinating, true history of Missoula’s Boxcar Library, the novel blends the story of the strong, courageous women who survived and thrived in the rough and rowdy West with that of the power of standing together to fight for workers’ lives. And through it all shines the capacity of books to provide connection and light to those who need it most.