Book Description
Lyndon Song is a renowned sculptor who fled New York City to become a Brussels sprouts farmer in the small California town of Rosarita Bay. Lyndon has a brother, Woody, an indicted financier turned movie producer, and Woody has a plan, involving a golf-course resort on Lyndon’s land and an aging kung-fu diva from Hong Kong with a mean kick and a meaner drinking problem.
Over one madcap Labor Day weekend, this plan wreaks havoc on Lyndon’s bucolic and carefully managed life. Woody’s financial (and existential) crisis embroils everyone from a developer obsessed with college football to two field biologists studying western snowy plovers, and culminates in literature’s first-ever windsurfing chase scene. Meanwhile, Lyndon’s great love, Sheila Lemke, the impulsive mayor of Rosarita Bay, is having a crisis of her own, leading her to petty vandalism; other women smell mysteriously of chocolate ice cream; Buddhist missives arrive scrawled on paper airplanes; and a small plot of exceptionally lush marijuana is ready for harvest. In all, Lyndon’s life in Rosarita Bay is ready to come apart at the seams.
Hilarious and philosophical, this many-hued novel about the landscape of contemporary “multicultural” America is critically acclaimed Don Lee’s best book yet.