Irresistible (NEW YORKER)Plenty here to enjoy, including brilliant flashes of black humour ... beautifully paced and, finally, very moving (OBSERVER)A feel-good upbeat book about life and death, Romeo and Juliet, drive-ins and a kinder, gentler American past (NEW YORK TIMES)The new John Irving ... there are moments not only of broad comedy, but also a host of quirky, affectionate cameos (TIME OUT) It's the 1960s in Jacksonville, Florida (where the sixties are still the fifties). Some of America's last sweet moments of innocence are unfolding out on the coastal highway at the Flamingo, the largest drive-in movie theatre in the world. Its owner, Southern patriarch Hubert Lee, possesses a fervour matching the size of the Great White Wall of the Flamingo's gigantic screen tower, where John Wayne or Audrey Hepburn or invading body-snatchers flicker nightly. Hubert's unforgiving ego meets its match in Turner West, who owns the funeral home next door and wants to build a cemetery on land staked by his gleefully stubborn neighbour. So when Hubert's teenage son Abe develops his first adolescent crush, it makes devilish sense that the object of his affections should be Grace, Turner's only daughter and the apple of his eye. At once funny and heart-breaking, THE FLAMINGO RISING is a novel full of tenderness and insight about the power of love, the need for faith and the persistence of memory.
Excerpts from reviews of Larry Baker's The Flamingo Rising"A first novel that dares mix the Icarus, Oedipus and Earhart myths, risks
a Romeo and Juliet update, plunders Dante, references the Bible, rewrites
movie history and inside-outs the American past. Yet Baker's book is far
from pretentious. It's one of the more endearingly adept debuts to come
along in a while....A novel that is as fully realized as it is inventive,
humorous and heartaching."
--Los Angeles Times
"Like his flamingo, Baker never loses his footing."
--The Star Ledger
"[The Flamingo Rising] is an American original, as big and as full
of promise as a drive-in movie screen, formed out of the grist and gristle
of late 20th century fiction."
--Atlanta Constitution
"This is much more than a sum of memorable parts; it is a literary tour de
force, a study of barriers built and torn down."
--New Orleans Times-Picayune
"This pitch-perfect first novel is reminiscent of the best of John
Irving....Like the giant July 4th fireworks display toward which the story
builds, this engaging, moving novel sends up one sparkler after another on
its way to a crash-bang, heart-stopping ending."
--Publishers Weekly
"The coming of age story is done to a fine turn in Baker's absolutely
delightful first novel, which is also a clever spin on the Romeo and
Juliet theme."
--Booklist
"A truly affecting work, and an inventive one."
--Kirkus Reviews
"[Baker's] own sense of theatre is so grand that only after three hundred
pages does everything come joltingly into focus....Larry Baker is writing
for grownups but he remembers how it felt not to be one, and renders the
experiences in unforced, unshowy prose, neither folksy nor formal. The
result is a novel that's both modest and surprisingly seductive."
--The New Yorker
