Review and quotes: The Walk

Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Rose City Reader. Share the opening quote from the book.
The Friday 56 is hosted at Freda's Voice.  Find a quote from page 56.

Review, of sorts, to follow.

This is the book I'm highlighting right now---

Title: The Walk by Richard Paul Evans

Book Beginnings:

Prologue: My name is Alan Christoffersen. You don't know me. 'Just another book in the library.' my father would say. 'Unopened and unread.' You have no idea how far I've come or what I've lost. More important, you have no idea what I've found.

Friday 56:

As a boy I heard this story in church. A man was patching a pitched roof of a tall building when he began sliding off. As he neared the edge of the roof he prayed, 'Save me, Lord, and I'll go to church every Sunday, I'll give up drinking, I'll best man this city has ever known.' As he finished his prayer, a nail snagged his overalls and saved him. The man looked up to the sky and shouted, 'Never mind, God, I took care of it myself.' How true of us.---Alan Christoffersen's diary

Summary: Everything in Alan Christoffersen's life is gone---his wife, his job, his friends, his money, his home. After a suicide attempt is thwarted, he decides to walk across the country, the furtherest point he can get from where he lives in Washington State. That point in Key West, Florida. He starts out on his walk with very little planning. He just wants to get away from where he is and all the painful memories he wants to leave behind. Among the few things he does take a long with him is a blank journal. He hopes to record his thoughts and feelings as he crosses the country. The quote from page 56 is an example of a journal entry. This book is about his walk, who he meets, and what he learns along the way.

Review: At first I thought the book was a little light-weight, a kind of dressed up romance novel. You know, man meets girl, man gets girl, man loses girl, man finds self type of book. It reads fast and is a book club selection, so I had no doubt I would finish it, but that didn't mean I was going to enjoy it. That is until about page 200 when it suddenly became clear to me that there were "angels" located along the route ready to offer assistance and thoughtful words of encouragement. Suddenly I was interested to see how far Alan would get on his trip and what he would learn along the way. What he did learn wasn't what I expected and it was profound and life-changing.

I'm actually pretty excited to discuss the book in my club and to share some of my inspirations from it. I'm also really glad that this book came along when it did, as our club has been reading pretty heavy stuff lately, the kind of books that drag you down, not lift you up. The Walk is just the opposite of that and I am sure that our club will appreciate that.

After visiting Richard Paul Evans' webpage, I learned that The Walk is the first book in a series of five books about the physical and spiritual journal of Alan Christoffersen. I'm pretty happy to learn that this book is part of a series because Alan never even makes it out of Washington State by the end of this book. Richard Paul Evans was extremely popular in my library with teens because of his Michael Vey series. The first book I read by him, and it may be his most popular, is called The Christmas Box.

I listened to the audio version of The Walk expertly read by the author. I was shocked to learn that the narrator wasn't the actor John Cusack. They sound a lot alike. Ha!

Evans, Richard Paul. The Walk. Simon and Schuster Audio, 2010. Audible Audiobook available from my library.





SOTH Book Club May 2019