Dairy Queen Days
Reprint Edition Copyright 1998 by Robert Inman
Published by Little Brown & Co.
ISBN 0316418374; $12.95 PAPERBACK
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In the grand tradition of Southern storytelling, Robert Inman weaves a rich and evocative tale of a teenage boy's struggle to forge his own identity beneath the searing Georgia summer sun. The year is 1979, and the stable moorings of sixteen-year-old Trout Moseley's life have been torn loose. His mother is in an Atlanta psychiatric for reasons he cannot fathom, while his father, a three-hundred-pound Methodist minister who rides a motorcycle, has begun delivering scandalous sermons comparing Jesus to Elvis and the Holy Ghost to his college football coach.
Moving back to the small Southern town that bears his family name, Trout is caught between powerful ancestral traditions and the need to create an identity of his own. Deeply entwined in Trout's struggle to find himself are the rest of the townsfolk: Aunt Alma and her daunting admonition "Don't forget who you are" (as if he knew); Uncle Cicero and his offer of a "respectable" job at the local hardware store (versus the chance to work at Dairy Queen, a place with no history); the learned, quirky Great Uncle Phinizy; and, most of all, Keats, the strong-willed, sharp-tongued girl who wins his heart. In Inman's skillful rendering, these characters pulse with life, crackle with energy, and leave an ineradicable stamp upon both the reader's memory and Trout's impressionable soul.
Brimming with mystery, sadness, and exquisite beauty of youth, Dairy Queen Days evokes a world that is alternately kind and cruel, tragic and comic, godless and divine -- and, finally, one in which a young man can gain a sense of who he is and where he needs to go.
