JUST PAST OYSTERVILLE, a novel by Perry Perkins, takes the reader on the classic journey of the impossible quest.  Cassie Bellanger, a teenage girl between high school and college, recently deprived of her mother’s life by the atypical drunk driver, has a goal in mind.  She has set out hiking down the road in search of her father, a man she had yet to meet.

William Beckman.  Just Past Oysterville.  That was all the information the marriage certificate she found amongst her mother’s things told.

And yet, JUST PAST OYSTERVILLE is more than Cassie Bellanger’s story of confronting the man she believes abandoned her mother and herself.  It is also the story of Jack Leland, the middle-aged, roughneck/soft-hearted curmudgeon book trader who acquiesces to the teenager’s request for a ride farther north.  It is their two stories converging upon the same path and discovering more similarities in the mutual hope for resolution than differences.

JUST PAST OYSTERVILLE is one impressive work.  I do believe I could easily recommend to any person seeking just a good story that this is something entertaining, as well as enlightening.    Mr. Perkins gives strong characterizations of the two main characters, while excelling in drawing definitive pictures to the mundane action found in much of the novel’s beginning.  Cassie’s hiking along the road would normally engender little reader interest.  It is, after all, nothing more than a girl walking along a lonely stretch of road.  And yet, somehow, Mr. Perkins takes the reader along, seeing what Cassie sees, feeling what she feels, hearing what she thinks.  The minutiae other writers seem to relish in, to describe every infinite detail with a precision ultimately losing the story somewhere, he subtlety passes by – just as Cassie physically walks by it as of no importance to her ultimate goal: making it to Oysterville and confronting her father.  Happily, this is a characteristic he adeptly maintains through the novel’s entire 244 pages.

I regret to say much of the dialog between the characters fails to hold together as well.  Multiple stretches of dialog sound contrived – forced, almost; which is understood once the thorough depth of the trauma the characters endure is realized.

How is one to properly articulate the anger and the pain a teenage girl feels towards the father who never made the attempt to be a part of her raising over the years?  How does a middle-aged man shoulder the burden of losing his best friend, the woman he loved, and his calling?  These hurts run years deep, and they can never be thoroughly explained to others through the limited nature of words.  Perkins does his best, and his attempts at communicating through dialog do carry the story along, but even the most adept purveyor of the written would find such challenges difficult – if not impossible.  This arouses another commendation Mr. Perkins well deserves.

JUST PAST OYSTERVILLE will certainly be classified under the title of “Christian Fiction”, which turns out as a sad reality after reading the story in context.  The story transcends any “preachy” quality those who avoid such classification would expect, as this is a story about Christian people who suffer the same troubles and pains as any people living underneath God’s heaven.  There are no quick fix solutions.  All is not resolved by a mantra-recitation of Scripture with no understanding of what is being read.  On the contrary, Cassie and Jack’s struggles are both twenty years in the making. 

While not the “edgy” piece of writing those who disagree with this assessment would prefer (ANY mention of church, the Bible, or Jesus is ‘preachy’ in their view), JUST PAST OYSTERVILLE realistically portrays the Good News in life terms, rather than incessant ramblings of the King’s English Holy Scripture.  It brings to mind the efforts Jesus used in telling the people about God’s Truth.  He spoke to them in parables.  Today, He just might tell them a story of forgiveness quite similar to JUST PAST OYSTERVILLE.