Roughly a year after the nuclear meltdown that precipitated the events of Godspeed, Cedar Key\u00a0(2024),the remaining few hundred residents of the titular locale\u2014about a quarter of its former population\u2014are slowly rebuilding their economy and infrastructure. Despite damage from nuclear fallout and extreme weather, the locals have managed to start breeding chickens again and have even mastered using slow-burning wood to create fuel for cars and boats. Although the once-central clamming industry is no longer viable, some fauna have returned to the island, including a bounty of white shrimp. The story opens with the marriage of Cedar Key\u2019s Luke Buck to a woman named Kinsey from Sumner, on the mainland. Their wedding symbolizes a tenuous peace between the two communities, who came to blows over old grudges and dwindling resources in the early days of the \u201cnew world.\u201d As it happens, the wedding isn\u2019t the only cause for celebration, because Col. Robert McCloud\u2014long assumed dead\u2014returns in a dramatic crash landing after more than a year on the mainland. Sent out from Cedar Key for reconnaissance, the colonel was shot down in the wilds of Florida, surviving only by using his old Marine Corps training. He discovers in short order that he was shot down by Isaac Skipjack, a known entity on the island and the son of Buddy Skipjack, a fisherman who was caught stealing clams in the late 1990s and later died in the back of a police car. Now, years later, Isaac is leading a Coast Guard ship full of other mainlanders, with violence on his mind.<\/p>\n
Bobbitt\u2019s follow-up to his debut offers a reading experience that many readers will find similar to that of the first installment, which is a very good thing. Like its predecessor, this novel brims with characters whose attachments to one another feel real and carry emotional weight. For example, Mark David\u2014a Cedar Key fisherman and the father of young mayor Hayes David\u2014took young Isaac in years ago, but the boy soon discovered that Mark may have been involved in his biological father\u2019s death. In addition, the author\u2019s expertise about the culture and geography of the part of the country in which the series is set makes for a richly detailed, authentic-feeling read: \u201cWhen the bay is glassy calm, and the tide is low, it\u2019s easy for the farmer to think big thoughts about what everything means, to find allegory in a diving cormorant, metaphor in the interplay of light and water.\u201d Such vivid prose abounds in these pages, and the action scenes studded throughout the narrative\u2014most especially, the gun and naval battles in which characters on both sides of the conflict fight and die\u2014make for a propulsive narrative through which readers will be happy to travel.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Roughly a year after the nuclear meltdown that precipitated the events of Godspeed, Cedar Key\u00a0(2024),the remaining few hundred residents of the titular locale\u2014about a quarter of its former population\u2014are slowly rebuilding their economy and infrastructure. Despite damage from nuclear fallout and extreme weather, the locals have managed to start breeding chickens again and have even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3202,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3201"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}