Friday, July 6, 2012

Book: Legacy Road

Today, I’d like to take a look at a novel from Graham Garrison titled Legacy Road. It’s published by Kregel Publishers, and the company provided the book free for this review. If you’d reather not read on since it’s a freebie review, then you’ve been warned.

The novel Legacy Road is a story of redemption and regret, of love and loss, and it’s based down in Georgia. Slightly more than a decade ago, I lived in Georgia, and I still live in the rural South, just in Arkansas now. This novel reads much like the stories that are told around here and that I heard in my Georgia days.

What do I mean by that? Garrison, the author, presents the reader with people that you don’t quite know at the beginning, and then across the pages you get most of their backstory as you also get the story the book intends to tell. As a person used to hearing people presents stories like this, as it takes nearly a year to get a whole story told around here, that is not too disturbing for a book.

Personally, I do prefer books to move a bit faster, but Garrison also does not ramble here for my taste. It follows, as I said, a fairly normal Southern storytelling method “Let me tell you this, oh, I have to also tell you that.”

The other aspect of the book that is similar to our Southern ways is a peculiar imbalance of descriptions. One chapter describes arriving in a small town to examine an old Civil War battle area. The town is sparsely described, barely three sentences. Yet it draws on the small, railroad-side towns that most of us in these here parts are well aware of. For a reader in the urban world, this could be distracting. Or at least inadequate: “How in the world,” you may ask, “can a town be describe as a stop-sign and a post office?”

Drive down one of those state-numbered highways, though, and you’ll see a dozen examples between interstate exits.

The story is good here. The overall thrust of redemption and looking more strongly to your future, no matter what has happened in your past, is a worthwhile message.

The method of telling it, though, will lose some people. I’ll admit it was tough for me to read this book faithfully. The style did not quite grab my attention and demand that I follow-through and finish this book before I started another. It felt more like a “read me when you’ve got time or nothing better to do” book.

I would not call this a must-read, but it’s not a must-avoid either. If you need more spark and excitement, you’ll want to look elsewhere, but it’s a less an excitement book and more of a Saturday afternoon chat.

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