t'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.