A Tinker's Damn

So seldom, so very rare, to find a contemporary author with the literary ability of Wimberley. If you have not experienced the rough scrub, back country of Florida's panhandle, you will capture it in A TINKER'S DAMN. Your senses will rain down about you in feverish torrents of colors, smells, and imagery, then be gripped in tension as the tale's swelled emotions rip the fabric of the characters' lives. This novel of a father-son relationship searching for common ground moves with crushing impact not unlike Ivan Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons", but vividly more. It draws a reader in like a vacuum and never lets go. A haunting. I read it in three sittings, and struggled in between with a constant pull to return to the pages. Revenge, justice, redemption... all interlaced in a fiery meltdown of the characters' wills, and poured out redefined in the outcomes. Loved it. No need to go out 'Finding Forrester'--he's here among us, in these pages.

"Tinker's Damn" is the story of a man who most readers would consider to be moderately successful in his life. He, his wife and son (from whose point of view the story is told) live in the Depression-era Florida panhandle. They have a house, land, enough to eat, and work. Tinker "Tink" Buchanan, however, doesn't have the one plot of land he feels that is his own; his father had lost their family land when Tink was a child, and Tink's one purpose in life is to make enough to buy the land back. Tink's son, Chance, doesn't understand the cancer in his father's soul, especially after he falls in love with the daughter of his father's enemy. "Tinker's Damn" is a very-well-told story of generational conflict, and its tragedy comes in softly but dramatically. When I finished the book, I literally had to put it in a drawer before going back to look at it again. I understood Chance's life in a way that disturbed me, which is a mark of a great storyteller. Mr. Wimberley has brought a spark of the universal into this small story of a small tragedy. I eagerly look forward to reading more of Mr. Wimberley's work. His is a rare gift.