walker's island review

Here's my review of K. J. Radebaugh's astonishing first novel, Walker's Island. Click the title of this post to see this review on Amazon and order the book.

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K. J. Radebaugh is a born story teller. I started reading Walker's Island several months ago and finally finished it last week. Completing the book felt like saying goodbye to a dear friend, complete with tears spilt on the last page.

This story, which rambles through the period from 1865 to 1898, is set in a fictional county in south central Florida. The main characters are cowboys. Now, I am not someone who seeks out stories about cowboys in Florida, set two centuries ago. I just want a good reading experience, something that opens me up and moves me somewhere.

I got that from this book. Like life, the story moves sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, enjoying the telling. It makes life bigger and richer. Let me share a few sentences from the book.

Raymond "fell into a waking sleep that rode the current of his breath until it joined the creek and flowed away, past the cold ground beneath him, past Beely's farm, past the raiders and Lieutenant Fitz and the war, all the way back to the beginning."

"The church, the hotel and cafe, the railroad track, and the road itself were Jessie's world, bounded by a sash and frame and separated from her by a piece of real glass with a watery ripple in one corner."

Red's hair "was the hot, brilliant red of a pitch pine fire, shot through with gleaming copper lights and piled on top of her head in a heap of curls and tendrils and waves that were barely contained by three large tortoiseshell combs. Its weight seemed to bear down on the woman beneath it, who supported herself with an elbow on a rough cypress table, head in hand."

"Jack was different. It wasn't his odor, which was grassy and sweet like cured hay, or his hair, which was fine and thin and floated on his head like dandelion silk. It wasn't even his peckish appetite or small, skinny, fragile-looking frame. The problem, at least in the beginning, was Jack's speech. He made odd sounds. Jack trilled, hooted, squeaked, and twittered. He hiccupped, snorted, sneezed, coughed, and popped his lips like a feeding bream. He twitched, too, tapping and fluttering fingers as thin as chicken bones. And he watched things as he tweeted and twitched - bugs and dust motes, sunlight reflecting off a pot, Jessie's hands on the biscuit dough - with an absorption that went beyond concentration."

That kind of writing made reading Walker's Island immensely enjoyable through all the ins and outs of 33 years in the lives of some people who now seem realer than real.

I'm happy to know this is the first novel in a trilogy, so I have more of K. J. Radebaugh's writing to look forward to!