The Kentucky Ranger

The Kentucky Ranger follows Jasper Very, a towering backwoods preacher raised in the lawless wilds of Rogues' Harbor, who returns to his troubled community determined to lead it out of vice and into grace. The novel opens with a group of young people returning from a camp meeting, their mockery of Jasper setting the tone for the moral battles to come. Curnick renders the Kentucky frontier with unsentimental precision: the mud, the isolation, the hard-drinking men and long-suffering women, the particular loneliness of a man called to save souls who can barely get through a sermon without being laughed out of the clearing. Jasper is no plaster saint. He carries the roughness of his upbringing, the anger, the doubt. What distinguishes him is his stubborn refusal to abandon people who despise him. This is frontier fiction without the mythology. No clean victories, no manifest destiny. Just one man trying to talk his neighbors away from the bottle and toward something like grace, and the cost it extracts from him.