The Giver of Stars
By Jojo Moyes
Certain settings are red flags and should steer me clear of their reading. There’s nothing wrong with something like Kentucky in the 1930’s, but you could make a list of books with that exact setting titled “Books For Dylan to Avoid”. For that reason it’s hard for me to say Jojo Moyes’ The Giver of Stars is a bad book, but I couldn’t say it’s a good book either. The setting may not have been my favorite flavor, but there were issues with pacing and resolution that left me dissatisfied on top of whatever feelings I had going in.
The plot is a series of dissatisfied women working as a pony-based, library delivery service to people in a backwater town whose main export is capitalist-related fatalities and moonshine. The scrappy librarians fight amongst themselves until they don’t and eventually overcome a corrupt court case stacked against one of them. There are romances that can’t flourish because the plot demands they wait until the end, using christianity or trauma to explain the delay. There’s a mustache twirling sort of villain who could only be more evil in a different novel where he was encouraged to use slurs and sexual violence to communicate. All the characters possessed the most straightforward of arcs and the few that could have been more interesting disappointed me in their plainness.
Alice, one of the librarians who serves as the main character, is married to Bennett, and it isn’t going well. She struggles to be intimate with him, not knowing how herself, while he is so scandalized, it’s as if his mother were in bed with him. Also his father, the comically evil capitalist, verbally encourages them from the other room, and is otherwise more involved in his son’s sex life than Alice is. Plot happens and Bennett is somehow redeemed in the eyes of the novel, though he ends up with another woman. This was perfect for my grandmother, whose number one takeaway from the book about the fiercely independent women was that Bennett became the hero of the story. For me, I was disappointed that he got a redemption arc when he washed his hands in the blood his father spilled. I was hoping he would reveal himself to be as evil as his father, so inept he gave away the plan on accident, or simply gay. Instead he was a minorly complicated good man who waited until the plot demanded he act on morales that had been otherwise nonexistent.
Margery, the other main character librarian, spends the end of the book in court, where the town is more on trial than she is. I couldn’t figure out what was bothering me about it until the trial itself took place and Sophia, the one regular Black character in the book, “took a seat with the other colored folk”. It’s as if Moyes is trying to pull off the weight of something like To Kill a Mockingbird without taking any risks with it. This is an oversimplification of the second half of the book’s dramatic tension, but that’s fitting for an overly-simple book.
Maybe the content of the novel would have been more enjoyable had I wanted to live in its setting, had the characters been more complicated, or the swings been more than bunts. I’m willing to give Moyes another shot because the characters you were supposed to like were charming, and I believed the friendships that grew as the book wound on. Maybe her next bestseller will be more my speed, maybe I need to go read something else she wrote, maybe she’s simply not for me.