Cumberland Gap

Please Note: When I began this series, it was to cover a lot of authors whom I have found personally influential, even though this may only be because I enjoyed the stories they have told in their books or short stories. I’m just fortunate enough and well read enough that many of the authors I have personally enjoyed have also been influential on a macro scale as well as micro. rrt

Betty Layman Receveur was not a well-known, super best selling author nor was she particularly prolific, only publishing five books. There is not a wiki page for her. I found an obit for her from late December of 2003 which I find a bit amazing:

Betty Layman Receveur, a best-selling novelist who completed just one semester of high school before dropping out to marry at 14 and become a mother at 15, died Monday.

Receveur, a Louisville native who had lived most of her life there, died at Meadow View Health & Rehabilitation Center in Salem, Ind., after a long illness. She was 73.

Receveur called her writing a validation of her life in L. Elisabeth Beattie’s book, “Conversations with Kentucky Writers.”

Despite ending her formal education so early in life, Receveur remained an avid reader. “My great fear as a child was that I would read all the books in the world and there would be nothing left to read,” she told The Courier-Journal in 1979, when her first novel, “Sable Flanagan,” was about to be published.

I have only read two of her five books yet I well remember how blown away I was when I read the first one back in the early 1990s. The two books I have read are Oh Kentucky! and My Kentucky Home.

I was living in Rome, NY when I first read Oh Kentucky!. It was an easy decision to pick up the book when I saw the title and read the blurb on the cover. I have always been proud of Kentucky and was quite intrigued to read a tale set in the early days of settlement. I think the only disappointment I had in the book was there was no mention of my six great grandmother, (Elizabeth Boone Grant was Daniel Boone’s younger sister) who was one of the women of Bryan Station just north of Lexington and was the site of a siege by Indians during the Revolutionary War. She covered the siege as well as the Battle of Blue Licks, which was just a few days after the siege ended.

The two books I have read were well researched historical novels that followed the history that I had learned early on. Her other three books, Molly Gallagher, Carrie Kingston, and Sable Flanagan all appear to be Historical Romances leaning more to the romance than the historical side. I have not read them so I can’t say much about them but I can heartily and easily recommend the two I have read.

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