West with Giraffes

by Lynda Rutledge
Category: "Fiction - General"
Pages:346
Year of Publication:2021
Date Added:06/06/2025
Date Read:06/14/2025
Notes:Woody Nickel, orphaned by the dust bowl in Texas, makes his way to New York and arrives just as a ship, carrying two giraffes, makes it to port. The ship had been caught in a hurricane, and one of the giraffes was injured. Woody decides to link his fate to the giraffes, and follows them as they are taken to a quarantine facility and then trucked across the country to the San Diego Zoo. When the original driver turns out to be a drunk, Woody manages to talk Riley, the caretaker, into letting him be the driver. They are followed by a red-haired woman named Augusta, with whom Woody falls in love. She wants to take photos of the trip to sell to Life Magazine. They face all sorts of struggles — mountains, floods, attempted giraffe-nappings by circus people — but through it all, Woody bonds with the giraffes. He finds out more about Augusta — she's married, pregnant, and has a bad heart. They leave her in Phoenix to return to her husband. When Woody and Riley get the giraffes safely to San Diego, Woody steals a motorcycle and rides back to Phoenix to make sure Augusta is OK. He gets arrested and is given the choice of prison or the Army. He gets caught up in WWII and doesn't get back to the states until 1945. He looks up Augusta and finds out she had a daughter and then died. Riley is dead too. Woody gets a job in San Diego and visits the giraffes every day. After he turns 100, he decides he needs to write down the whole story for Augusta's daughter.
My Rating: 5

Reviews for West with Giraffes

Review - West with Giraffes

There were things I liked about the book — the adventures were exciting. But it wasn't really very well written. The descriptions of things rarely gave me a good picture of what they looked like, and it was hard to follow some of the action too. And there were way, way, way too many descriptions of Wood and Augusta, sitting on top of the truck, gently cradling the giraffes' heads in their laps. There really were giraffes that survived a hurricane and were trucked across the country to San Diego, but the rest of it was fiction. The author tried to make it all mean something deep, and failed in my opinion.

Reviewed by Roger on 2025-06-14 06:10:51

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