After Reading The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes

korsh john

• 05 februari 2026
• 9791224415350

Samenvatting:

There are books you read and then there are books that read you. Jojo Moyes' The Giver of Stars was the latter for me. I picked it up on a rainy afternoon, expecting a pleasant historical fiction escape, maybe something to keep me company for a few quiet evenings. What I got instead was a mirror held up to my own life, my own fears, and my own unspoken dreams.
Set in Depression-era Kentucky, the novel follows Alice Wright, an English woman who impulsively marries an American and finds herself trapped in a suffocating marriage in a small mountain town. When she joins Eleanor Roosevelt's traveling library initiative, she discovers a group of remarkable women who ride horses through dangerous terrain to bring books to isolated families. These packhorse librarians, as they were called, become her salvation and her family.
But this book isn't just about libraries or history, it's about what happens when women dare to step outside the lines drawn for them. It's about friendship that feels like coming home. It's about the quiet revolutions that happen when ordinary people decide they've had enough of being small.
I've read hundreds of books in my life, but few have stayed with me the way this one has. Weeks after finishing it, I found myself thinking about Alice's journey, about Margery's fierce independence, about the way these women created their own kind of freedom in a world determined to cage them. And I realized that this story had taught me lessons I didn't even know I needed to learn.