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rocketiza's review
3.0
As much as I love Brandon, it felt like this was overly ornate writing wrapped around not much of a story.
redroofcolleen's review
2.0
This reads like a glorious nature guide, with such intoxicatingly vivid descriptions of Florida landscapes that I want to hop on a plane and pronto! Only it's a fiction tale that barely creeps along, getting bogged down in the brush. No thanks.
chamblyman's review
4.0
With Ivory Shoals, John Brandon makes something old fashioned sharp and relevant again. Within its just shy of 300 packed pages, there is a bildungsroman, a picaresque, a quest, and a morality tale. There is peril, bravery, villainy, virtue, and lessons hard-learned. Echoes of Huck Finn abound, shades of Faulkner and McCarthy too, a dynamic vigor injected into the 19th century setting a la True Grit or The Good Lord Bird, and a nocturnal beauty akin to film classic Night Of The Hunter, yet Brandon's story stands tall on its own: a grand, heart expanding adventure of the deepest humanity.
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