Books: The Road To Grace

The Road to Grace
By Richard Paul Evans
Copyright 2012
Read by the author
Unabridged

This is the third (and I thought final but from the reviews on Amazon I guess not) book in Evans' trilogy about walking. The first, The Walk, was pretty good. The second, Miles to Go, was okay.

And then we come to this book.

This really shouldn't have been a third book. Honestly, these are all very short and I think it would have been better to have written a single larger book. But he did not and now we're stuck with these three books.

These books are about Alan, who lost his wife in the first book. After she died, he despaired and set out to walk from Seattle to Key West, Florida.

Along the way he meets a lot of people and sees a lot of stuff. In this last book, he is in Hannibal, Missouri, when the story ends.

This third book, unfortunately, falls short. The author obviously ran out of things to have happen to the character, and resorted to telling histories of the many towns that Alan walks through. While I enjoyed these little bits of Americana, and trusted the author enough to think that at least most of it was researched on Wikipedia if nothing else, the loss of character and forward momentum made for pretty dull listening after a time.

I wasn't looking for a travelogue, after all, but a story. I was interested in what happened to Alan. Or at least I was.

This is the second Evans book that I have not been overly thrilled about. I am glad he is one of the authors I listen to in the car and not one I intentionally spend time with.