The Old Road, by Jimmy D. Whitt, is a portal fantasy with its boots planted firmly in Appalachian soil. Pete begins as a young man from coal country who has already made a few bad choices and isn’t sure what comes next. Then an ordinary walk past an abandoned mine drops him into the Below, a vast underground world of Goblins, Kobolds, Elves, Dwarves, ruined civilizations, strange creatures, and a force simply called the Power. Whitt gets the adventure moving quickly, but the real hook is Pete himself. He carries the hollers, his mother, his humor, his regrets, and his way of looking at people into every strange encounter. Even when the world around him becomes increasingly fantastic, Pete remains recognizably the same kid who started out wondering whether his life was going anywhere.

The Below is built through discovery, and that makes exploring it with Pete a lot of fun. Glowing moss, enormous caverns, ancient roads, bags of holding, glyph-powered tools, underground settlements, strange mounts, lost cities, and competing peoples arrive as things Pete has to understand if he wants to stay alive. The Power gives the story a satisfying progression-fantasy engine, rewarding experience, intent, will, and hard-earned Milestones, but Whitt connects that system directly to character. Pete becomes more capable because he’s learning to pay attention, work, endure, and make better choices. His training under Keres turns those ideas into the backbone of the book. Their relationship grows from wary necessity into trust and affection, with Keres’s relentless lessons in observation and survival becoming as important to Pete’s development as any supernatural ability.

As the story opens up, The Old Road becomes more than a journey through an exotic underground world. Pete’s arrival intersects with missing scouts, mysterious gateways, Elven activity, old abuses of the Power, institutional politics, and dangers that increasingly suggest his presence in the Below matters. Brannick and Lirissa broaden the cast without stealing the story away from Pete, while Pete’s eventual entry into Scout training gives him something he has rarely had before: a place where effort, discipline, friendship, and ability might actually lead somewhere. Whitt also keeps Pete’s sense of humor alive through all of it. His Earthbound comparisons, awkward reactions, running commentary, and occasional inability to leave well enough alone give the book an easy conversational energy even when assassins, political maneuvering, and ancient threats begin closing in.

What stays with me most is the way The Old Road treats transformation as a series of choices. Pete gains extraordinary abilities, but the more important change is that he begins taking responsibility for what kind of person he’ll become. That gives the book’s adventure real emotional weight and makes its cliffhanger ending feel like the opening part of a much larger story. Whitt has created a fantasy world with plenty to explore, but he’s also given readers a protagonist worth following down every dark passage ahead. The Old Road turns an Appalachian kid’s search for a future into a gripping journey through another world, and makes every hard-won step feel like it matters.

Pages: 183 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0DS2Q2PR4