A Young Man and Three Snakes Go AWOL in St. Augustine

A Young Man and Three Snakes Go AWOL in St. Augustine https://ift.tt/FwJ20Lb

Florida-based author Ginger Pinholster, in her second and newest novel, Snakes of St. Augustine, writes, “I’m not a fan of snakes either, but we can’t go around hating every single thing that scares us.”

Snakes, apparently, like humidity, so the coastal city of St. Augustine is the perfect setting for this tale of reptiles and the unusual personalities drawn to them. In Snakes of St. Augustine, the lives of Trina Leigh Dean, her friend Fletch, Serena and Gethin Jacobs, Rocky, and Jazz twist and turn against one another like a serpent’s coils.

Serena is a health trainer who looks after her brother Gethin, who has an unspecified neurological disorder, and his neurotypical, loving, but increasingly frustrated girlfriend Rocky. Jazz, an unhoused computer whiz and lover of Winnie the Pooh and Leaves of Grass, pursues the older Serena and is determined not to be a creeper. His mother has schizophrenia and he himself has bipolar disorder, though he refuses to take his prescribed lithium despite his increasing mania.

The novel revolves around the theft of three valuable snakes — an Eastern indigo, a ball python, and a banded king snake — from Trina’s serpentarium. It turns out that snakes are catnip to certain people, who might be described as round pegs in the square holes of Southern society. If Truman Capote had seized the opportunity to write a novel explicitly about mental illness (along with shady military veterans and meth mites), he might have written characters resembling those in Pinholster’s St. Augustine. The theft coincides with Gethin’s disappearance, and while Serena and Jazz look for Gethin, Fletch looks for Trina’s beloved Unicorn, Banana Splits, and Bandit.

A strength of the novel is that when the fast-paced, winding plot catches its breath, we get to admire the beautiful scenery of St. Augustine. As Pinholster describes the community’s lower-middle class haunts, seedy restaurants, and unhoused encampments, always with great accuracy, we welcome every instance of local flora and Spanish moss.

Another strength is that the two neurodivergent characters — Gethin and Jazz — are shown to be capable of sincere and abiding romantic devotion. Unfortunately, this is offset by the lengths taken to make sure the reader knows that both characters are attractive despite their peculiarities.

A fault of the novel lies with an imbalance between two characters — one is missing in action, while the other is overabundant. Trina disappears from the narrative after the theft of her snakes. She’s a well-adjusted and intriguing woman whose drug habits, derangement, and lack of sculpted muscles make her presence sorely missed as the novel progresses.

Meanwhile, we spend a great deal of time with police officer Fletch Jeffries, who is a gasp away from retirement. Great care is taken to reassure us that he is a good, non-racist cop, who works with fellow good cops. Ample opportunities to explore the legacy of police brutality in St. Augustine, a city Dr. Martin Luther King once said “never had peaceful race relations,” were overlooked. The issue of systemic racism is only briefly addressed in a scene between Rocky, who is Black, and two Southerners who are racist.

Snakes of St. Augustine is an engrossing novel from an author who delves into a wealth of subjects and who paints a broad canvas of human emotion and behavior. The plot and characters are unique, and the denouement will linger. This story will be particularly invaluable to those with an interest in how minorities, women, and those who are neurodivergent are treated within the deep South and beyond. Pinholster reveals how these folks must tread very carefully — there are poisonous snakes all around, and the ones with two legs can be the most dangerous.

Snakes of St. Augustine
By Ginger Pinholster
Regal House Publishing
Published September 12, 2023