“A perfect balance between history and fiction… Rutledge blends fictional characters with real historical personalities to create a story that is equal parts educational, quirky, and romantic.”
–POPSUGAR.com
West with Giraffes is Austin writer Lynda Rutledge’s second novel, preceded by Faith Bass Darling’s Last Garage Sale, winner of a 2013 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award. While conducting research in the archives of the San Diego Zoo, Rutledge came across a trove of newspaper articles about two giraffes that had survived a hurricane on the deck of a freighter and a cross-country trip, from New York to California, in 1938. Inspiration struck, and the result is this charming and wondrous enchantment of a novel.
The tale is told through Nickel’s memoir as he writes it in the VA hospital, in a race against time the avenger, the historical story unfolding in first-person narration, regularly interrupted by various nurses and orderlies doing their utmost to convince this cantankerous author-on-a-mission to rest, eat, or take a pill already; he is 105 years old. Even the foreshadowing of tragedy manages to be funny.
The plot unfolds fast and steady, with a surprise down every highway. The dialogue is simple, as related by a seventeen-year-old from the sticks, sometimes clever, sometimes sweet, always true. Nickel says of Augusta, “If Red’s heart was already broken, mine had barely been used . . . her face full of things I did not understand yet was desperate to remember.”
West with Giraffes is a madcap scrape of a coming-of-age road trip, complete with stowaways, circuses, attempted giraffe-napping, biblical catastrophe, romance, shocking truths, brave sacrifices, and tragedy—in short, a grand adventure.
Source: https://www.lonestarliterary.com/content/lone-star-review-west-giraffes