Walker's Island

By K.J. Radebaugh

Get a road map of Florida. Put your finger on the spot where Osceola, Okeechobee, and Polk counties meet, and push those three counties back a little bit. Next, think back to that long moment in the Florida cattle industry between 1865 and 1898. Good. Now you've got a fair idea of when this story takes place, and where Harris County would be if it existed anywhere else but in this book. Walker's Island is directly under your finger. Move your finger, and you might see a cypress tree growing off by itself. Buried at the foot of that tree is a man who knows something about betrayal. He tries to tell Raymond Pennell what he knows, but Raymond can't hear him. It will be another thirty years before Raymond understands that his choices are what haunt a man, and that the deadliest betrayals are those of his own heart.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1434830462
• ISBN13: 9781434830463
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 414 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.9" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

An adventure that lasted for weeks

Walker's Island is an epic that doesn't present itself as an epic. It just turns out that it IS one. From the first page, the reader becomes immersed in the detailed world of Raymond and Dolly and everyone they encounter over the next 33 years. The characters are so fleshed-out, their actions so well-documented, that I had to be careful not to read the suspenseful parts at bedtime or I would lie awake after I turned off the light! Radebaugh is able to articulate with lovliness even the earthiest of her characters. There is something in this book for everyone: Civil War soldiering, cattle driving, pioneering women, family and historical Florida, not to mention a villain you learn to fear. If you want to go on an adventure, read this book. It'll take you there.

Change Happens

Although the place of Walker's Island certainly has a character-like presence in parts of the book, the heart of this story revolves around Jessie. We meet her as a girl in Civil war-torn Debbusy, where she keeps shop with her PTSD father and spends time looking out the window, imagining the great "out there." Readers travel with her to womanhood, becoming a wife and mother, establishing herself as a community matriarch, and beyond. The men in the story are larger than life, with their grand dreams, epic failures, cowboy jobs, and monstrous impulses. But it is through Jessie and her world that the novel lives and breathes and moves. I do feel obliged to mention that this is definitely a western novel. On page 4, a character spits (and hits!) a fly on a pile of rabbit poop. In the following 20 pages, 5 men are murdered. Lies are told; horses are stolen, and then the real action begins. There are wonderful, exotically western words like "spraddle-legged" and "coontie gravy" and the formal-yet-colloquial icon of all formal-yet-colloquial words: "beshat." Besides the language, the reader may also find herself reveling in the detail of how to slaughter hogs and disassemble them for use. Or how to make cinnamon rolls from scratch. Such labors of life escort the reader by the arm through the phases of the plot, punctuating the disagreements, brawls, misunderstandings, and mal-intent with hard work and the technical skills needed to hang a man or saddle a horse or construct your own coffin. This is a self-published book, and the help of an editor would surely smooth some of the rough edges. There are some typos. There are some rough transitions. But the glee of the vocabulary, of country folk dialogue, the artfulness of staging the turning point of the story at a communal cane grinding, take the reader past the rough edges and into this foreign world full of people just like us. By drawing out the beauty of daily chores and the emotional complexity of Jessie, Radebaugh has succeeded in writing a story that has the ability to draw even non-western readers into its pages. Although some of the stereotypes of the western are present - the dead horse, the prostitute, the shopkeeper, the cowboy, the churchman, the frontier wife -- Radebaugh transforms them into something even grander than stereotypes. She lets them change in human-like ways; indeed, few are safe from change under her pen. They are a tiny, small-minded woman one minute, a matriarch the next; a menace to begin with, and then a monster; a confused, prideful boy and moments later an initiated man; a dry cold soul at first and then a fierce lover. And by proving that her characters are always changing, she leaves the reader with the indisputable feeling that we all are transforming, for better or worse, whether we like it or not.

great read, looking forward to the sequels!

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!

Powerful and Moving Novel

This is a powerful and moving novel. An historical epic of the heart and soul. I just picked up the copy of this novel about 3 weeks ago and didn't know what to expect. After about 50 pages I was hooked. I knew nothing about the old south or the civil war but the characters and the writing drew me in deeper into this world, page by page. Starting at the end of the civil war, torn by strife and pain, the story unfolds as a ramshackle group of young men and children make some fateful choices, and grow up into adults, but their early tragic choices haunt their later lives and fates. There is history, magic and mystery in this novel. Very well written beautiful prose, that at times approaches poetry, yet never distracting from the story and the characters. This is a great novel - I highly recommend it!