Carrying Albert Home: The Somewhat True Story of A Man, His Wife, and Her Alligator
Coalwood
by Homer Hickam
Why You'll Love This
A West Virginia coal miner drives his wife's alligator back to Florida — and somewhere inside that absurd road trip is a genuinely heartbreaking love story.
- Great if you want: Depression-era Americana wrapped in warmhearted family mythology
- The experience: unhurried and meandering — like the road trip itself, in a good way
- The writing: Hickam blurs fact and memory into something that feels like folklore
- Skip if: you need a tight, plot-driven narrative to stay engaged
About This Book
Before Homer Hickam became the rocket-building teenager of Rocket Boys, his parents lived a quieter, stranger, more complicated life — and at the center of it was an alligator named Albert. Carrying Albert Home follows Hickam's parents as they drive from the West Virginia coalfields to Florida to return Elsie's beloved pet to his natural habitat. But the real journey is about a marriage tested by unfulfilled dreams, old loves, and the question of whether two people can truly choose each other when one of them isn't sure she ever did.
What makes this book distinctive is Hickam's willingness to sit inside ambiguity — to write about his own parents with honesty rather than sentimentality. The prose has the warm, unhurried quality of a story told on a front porch, yet it carries genuine emotional weight beneath its humor. Hickam layers folklore, Depression-era history, and road-trip adventure into something that reads like American mythology grounded in family truth. It's funny and melancholy in equal measure, and the balance never wobbles.
