“Laugh-out-loud funny” promises the cashier at Last Chance Gifts in the Key West International Airport when she sees my purchase, a book set in Key West. I am on my way out of town after another glorious week in paradise and would not mind a novel reminder of my all-too-brief stay in the Conch Republic. Author Carrie Jo Howe’s work, Island Life Sentence, seems to fulfil my needs. The book is an easy beach read where the primary character is living what seems to me to be everyone’s dream: she leaves the Chicago vicinity with her spouse and heads south. At a seemingly good point in their lives—they have recently sold a business, and nothing really is holding them back—they buy a conch house in Key West.
A Book Set in Paradise, but Life Is Not
But there is trouble in paradise. This late-in-life upheaval seems to be more of her husband’s dream than the main character’s own. He quickly takes off to Cuba, leaving Peg to manage just about everything on her own in Key West.
Being the new girl, anywhere, at any point in time, can bring with it a certain tentativeness. Everything takes longer than it should—from seeking your go-to coffee shop to determining what your favorite order is. Here, in Island Life Sentence, a clumsy, not too confident married woman of a certain age moves to a new place, makes new friends, learns new customs, and somehow manages not to clue in that her husband’s attention has waned. In this age of Instagram-perfect photos of influencers, main character Peg is the Glamour Don’t not just of fashion choices but pretty much everything she approaches.
Frazzled by the moist heat of Florida rains, oddly scared to cross bridges, not too swift on a paddleboard or timely even in Key West’s relaxed adherence to schedules, Peg can mess up a fishing trip, lose her dog in a storm, and—not that we would accuse her of drinking too much—see the ghosts of literary giants and of a six-toed cat. Could she be losing her mind, or is this just mainstream Key West madness?
A Novel Set in Key West Reflects Real Life in Key West
Some things you know just aren’t going to work out: paddleboard yoga, for instance. Peg ever is not quite as graceful as one might prefer oneself to be.
Thankfully for our plucky heroine, who has a bit of a bad day when giving that paddleboard yoga a good-faith try, she seems not to have been told of the existence of saltwater alligators. She finds enough trouble without them. Imagine Lucy trying to do downward dog on a board tentatively anchored somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico while Ricky remains out of country and out of touch. Laugh-out-loud funny indeed.
If you visit the Florida Keys and fantasize about chucking it all and relocating there, Island Life Sentence serves as a breezy reminder that, indeed, after enlightenment, there will still be laundry. But after the laundry, there will be Key West.
Bashful Adventurer
As much as Peg can turn any seemingly innocuous happenstance into, at the very least, a memorable one, she persists—not always with a chipper attitude, not always sober, not always entirely willingly; but at a moment when so many of us, on vacation or not, might be tempted just to make blanket tents in our beds and stay under the covers between now and forever, Peg never entirely gives up on her very changed life in Key West and all the hassles an old and creaky house brings. She is living the dream but encounters some turbulence.
Author Carrie Jo Howe gives readers a taste of real life in Key West. Peg experiences visits from haints (ghosts or evil spirits), a crumbling grotto said to protect the key from hurricanes, the opportunity presented by a good public library, and the specter of Cuba. Lest we think life on the key is all margaritas and cheeseburgers, Howe reminds readers through her story that the weather is a very real and sometimes tempestuous character with which one should not trifle. Also, it can mess with your hair.
Chorus Girls and the Daily Grind
With the ghosts of Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and other notables playing a Greek chorus of sorts, good conversation, whether real or imagined, plays an important role in this work. Howe deftly incorporates the realities of our current ways of communicating—texts, facetime, internet hiccups, and all—into the back-and-forth between Peg and those in her world. The ease of an iPhone and the hassle of health privacy rules gone too far, to the point where one just might lose touch with a loved one in the mire of the healthcare system, are contemporary life elements that are not always incorporated well into current fiction, which too often likes to pretend that we actually leave our houses without smartphones in hand but carry healthcare proxies on our person. In Howe’s island paradise, people use their phones and run afoul of the healthcare system, just like pretty much all of the rest of us do.
If you visit the Florida Keys and fantasize about chucking it all and relocating there, Island Life Sentence serves as a breezy reminder that, indeed, after enlightenment, there will still be laundry. Suppose your dream really does come true: You’ve moved to an adorable bungalow in Key West. Now what?
Whatever your path, be that happy-go-lucky happy camper no matter how many coconuts fall on your path.
—Lori Tripoli
Photo of a rainy Key West at night by M. Ciavardini