The Boxcar Librarian
This novel is based on history. In Missoula, Montana in the 1920s, a boxcar on the train that served nearby lumbering and mining camps was fitted up as a rolling Lumberman’s Library for the people in the camps. It was a big success. In The Boxcar Librarian, Brianna Labuskes fictionalizes this story, imagining the lives of three women associated with what she renames the Boxcar Library.
They are Colette Durand, the French-Canadian daughter of a miner who loved Shakespeare; Alice Monroe, a wealthy young Missoulian; and Millie Lang, an editor for the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) during the Depression. Her mission is to produce, with a team, a guidebook to Montana, which in those days was “under the copper collar” of the powerful Anaconda Mining Company.
At first their stories run separately. Colette is deeply involved with the unionizing movement that the company opposes, sometimes with violence. Alice leads a dull privileged life under her father’s thumb. And ten years later, Millie arrives, assigned to revitalize the struggling Missoula FWP guidebook team. But as the novel unfolds, the three stories begin to entwine. All three women are book-lovers or “tenders of stories,” and “romantic at heart.” Overprotected Alice spearheads the boxcar library project, hiring fierce Colette as the actual boxcar librarian. Later, Millie wants to put the story in her guidebook, and eventually in the 1930s the three finally meet.
The plot is complicated by union conflict, several mysteries and murders, some improbability—and of course several intriguing men. But once the boxcar library gets rolling (about halfway through), the novel lags a bit. Probably it would be 25% stronger if it were 25% shorter. Nevertheless, early 20th-century Montana is well-evoked, and the three bookish characters are always engaging.
