Pride of Eden, released March 17, 2020 by St. Martin’s Press, is a gritty book inhabited by even-grittier characters. Author Taylor Brown pulls together a diverse cast of mostly-unlikable characters. Anse Caulfield is a Vietnam vet and retired racehorse jockey. He is joined by Malaya, a discharged soldier who hunts poachers on an African wildlife preserved; Lope, a falcon-trainer who hunts surveillance drones; and Tyler, a female veterinarian and Anse’s lover. The writing here is at times beautiful and at times a bit over-the-top. Some areas seem almost jagged, but those areas increase the intensity of the four people, all somewhat loners and hanging onto the outer rim of humanity, who come together in a “pride” of their own. They rescue—often with less-than-legal methods—big cats, wolves, elephants, crocodiles, and other creatures and have established Little Eden, a wildlife sanctuary on the Georgia coast. Despite the band’s unorthodox methods, the reader can’t help but sympathize with both the characters and the animals they rescue. Brown binds together prehistory (for example, saber-toothed cats and mammoths trapped in the La Brea tar pits) and present times to establish a human-animal interconnection and has these animals narrate parts of the story.
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Pride of Eden is available through Amazon.
