To the Stars Through Difficulties

National Library Week is April 9 - 15, 2017, and this year’s theme is “Libraries Transform.” At BookPage, we celebrate the contributions of libraries and librarians every day, but this is an extra-special time of year to honor those who promote literacy all across the nation. Romalyn Tilghman’s debut novel, To the Stars Through Difficulties, is the story of three women who create a library and arts center after a tornado devastates a small Kansas town, inspired by the real-life frontier women who helped stock the 59 libraries funded by Andrew Carnegie in early 20th-century Kansas. Tilghman’s novel opens with a quote from Carnegie that says it all: “A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.”