The Island Only an Island When the Ocean Allow It

A richly illustrated, Odyssey‑echoing novel of post‑9/11 America—set on Galveston Island, where the Gulf keeps its own counsel and the dead have their own reservations.

On a bright Tuesday morning, jets scream low over the Victorian rooftops of Freetown. Amy Smart—young, newly adrift, and newly arrived on the island—runs outside expecting to find the world already broken. What she finds instead is a porch‑neighbor with shaving cream still on his jaw, a kitchen table that makes strangers into family, and a place that survives catastrophe the way it survives hurricanes: together, and with food.

But Galveston is not merely a setting. It is an organism—humid, beautiful, profane, holy, and haunted by what it has swallowed: storms, empires, vice, saints, sinners, and the unmarked histories that still breathe through old wood. As the nation tilts toward war and the news becomes its own form of psychological warfare, Amy is pulled into the island’s overlapping worlds: a found‑family neighborhood anchored by Mister Thomas and Ms. Elsie; a used bookstore with a velvet‑voiced queen of mischief; a queer nightlife that feels like a sanctuary; and a high‑style dinner at the Hotel Galvez that should not be possible… unless time on this island is not obliged to behave.

What begins as comfort becomes initiation. Hospitality becomes fate. And as Amy learns what it means to belong to a place built on beauty and buried grief, she discovers that some doors open both ways—and some hungers don’t stay metaphorical.

FULL‑COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS THROUGHOUT

This Kindle edition is lavishly illustrated in full color, with artwork woven alongside the text to deepen atmosphere and highlight key moments. The illustrations aren’t an add‑on—they’re part of the reading experience, enhancing the novel’s shifting tones of coastal Gothic, dark comedy, intimacy, and the uncanny.

(For the most vivid color experience, read in the Kindle app on a phone/tablet or on a color‑capable device.)

In these pages you’ll find:

• A Gulf Coast island that feels alive—salt, ghosts, glamour, rot, and stubborn joy.
• Found family, sharp dialogue, and community forged over biscuits, gumbo, and disaster.
• Queer life rendered with humor, tenderness, and bite—friendship as salvation and trouble as art.
• A myth‑shadowed structure (an American Odyssey) where “home” is the question, not the answer.
• Magical realism and historical hauntings that blur the line between memory and the present tense.

Perfect for readers who love literary fiction with teeth—Southern Gothic atmosphere, dark satire, big heart, and the shimmer of the supernatural.

Content note: This novel contains mature themes, strong language, depictions of racism, sexuality, drug use, and violence.

Open the first page. The jets are already overhead—and the island is already deciding who gets to stay.