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Anyone who loves books will enjoy this novel
Book Review
By Derryll White
Labuskes, Brianna (2025). The Boxcar Librarian.
“Not being heard is no reason for silence.” – from Les Miserables
Books are an amazing gift. The reader selects, often not knowing what to expect, and opens the cover to a wondrous journey. ‘The Boxcar Librarian’ certainly works that way. The author immediately engages the reader’s presumed love for books (why else would you pick it up).
Set in and near Missoula, Montana, a five-hour drive from East Kootenay, much of the landscape and history is familiar. The surprise is the delving into labour history and mine owner-worker tensions. Labuskes tells it as she sees it from her strong research base – exploitive, uncaring corporations and their minions using and belittling miners and miners’ families.
The author explores Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ proposal to rescue America from the Great Depression, and in particular the Works Progress Administration’s support for unemployed writers and artists, the Federal One Project. This sponsored a Guide Series set up to employ writers in capturing America and introducing it to a public not yet travelling much in their own land. The Montana Guide creates the central focus of the novel.
There are many strong themes that develop in this novel, not the least of which is the emergence of strong, willful and independent women and how hard that state is for a woman to achieve. The author’s treatment of this is sensitively written and very clear. No matter the difficulty women will stand on their own in the same way that union men stood behind their union – with commitment and fortitude.
Throughout the novel, Labuskes focuses on books. She introduces quotes from both classics and 1930s popular novels in a natural way, as part of the story. She also makes a very strong case for the power of books to build community, bring people together and allow them to dream of a better future.
And to do it in the face of a domineering large business and corrupt political presence. The reader does not have to stretch to bridge the gap between Montana in 1925 and Montana today. Anyone who loves books will enjoy this novel.
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Excerpts from the novel:
CURRENT REALITY – They all could see that fascism was a rolling tide that had reached America’s shores. The Ku Klux Klan’s membership rolls were bursting at the seams: desperate Americans were blaming anyone “with a hard to spell last name” for the fact that they didn’t have jobs; and prominent men like Henry Ford routinely spewed hateful anti-Jewish tirades while praising Adolf Hitler’s grand ideas.
CONVICTION – Papa had taught her that she should never just fight because of her own life, though. She had to want to fight for the lives of her neighbors and every worker across the state. Across the country even.
RADICALS – “Do you know who he is?”
“Finn Benson, a Wobblie from Chicago,” Papa said. His voice dropped when he used the slang term for Industrial Workers of the World agents. Even here, in the presence of one, they were dangerous to talk about. What with them being considered radicals.
GUIDE BOOKS – The fact that there would be someone at the top who got to decide what American stories were worth telling – or what stories were even considered American – was a fundamental flaw in the program. It was a fundamental flaw in their country, too.
REALIZATION – The play contained a passage that she’d memorized long ago when she’d read it and her understanding of men and women had shifted.
Helmer: Before all else you are a wife and a mother.
Nora: That I no longer believe. I think that before all else I am a human being, just as much as you are – or at least I will try to become one.
TODAY – She’d met plenty of people like that woman, who wanted everyone to think the exact same way they did for reasons Alice never understood. Wasn’t the world better when it was made up of people with a variety of beliefs and values and backgrounds? But the people who wanted to control what books others read tended to be scared, small-minded and angry. There was only so much energy Alice could waste on them.
HOPE FOR AMERICA – I strongly believe one of the best ways to fight fascism, hatred, and bigotry is by getting to know the people who are scapegoated, who are different than us, who live in a different state, pray to a different God, eat different food, listen to different music, love different books.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
