Apopka by Apopka Historical Society
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

There is so little written that entirely encompasses northwest Orange County and here’s one of the few books that attempts to cover it. The Apopka Historical Society took this project on and the best source to gather images and history to do it. It is constrained by the limits Arcadia typically has for their massive series of photo histories. However, the Apopka Historical Society dropped the ball despite the opportunity.

The book opens with a nod of making use of Jerrell Shofner’s book as a main backbone for research. Seems that would lead to an outstanding presentation. What ends up happening is to mush self observance by the Society in putting the book together.

The book is full of the typical layout of an Arcadia book, with history generally covered from the 1800 to present. I wish they had paid more attention to Shofner’s attention to detail and historical layout. Instead all is way too simply brushed over. So mush that could have been written isn’t and there are way too many winks and nods to inside jokes apparently presented.

It’s nice to know that the Apopka Historical Society knows itself so well to pepper the book with secret messages to others, but I would have hoped that there was more a drive to present the history as much as possible and less about self awareness.

That leads to the worse part of this book – The last 4th of the book is full of very recent photographs about those living, at the time of publication, and simple sentences of who they are. How on earth is former State Senator Henry Land only written about in a way i just did in this sentence without listing his accomplishments in office and so much else he and the Land family did is lost to me.

This really falls on Arcadia that lets folks publish pretty much whatever they want with little to no involvement due to the cheap reproduction involved. An editor could have flagged the problems.

There are good photos and some memorabilia shown and that is the only real benefit of this book. For that I bring this up to two stars. Otherwise…

Bottom line: I do not recommend this book. 2 of 10 points.

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