A lusty parable filled with hearty surprises, LY A Lunatic Love Life takes the reader on an emotional and intellectual romp through a strange parallel universe and an achingly lovely romance. First-time author Stephen Leon White has created a foreign landscape with its own set of rules that nevertheless seems as familiar as the streets we live on. A young man of twenty-one distracted by daydreams of love, Oliver Sandwich suddenly finds himself in a pickle as he tries to jam a "ladder" down his neighborhood mailbox instead of the "letter" his mother asked him to mail. Falling in atop a mountain of dead letters, Oliver loses his bearings as he encounters a place he never dreamed of -Letterland, a loony world where letters live full lives before being called upon to take their place in the words we write; a world where "L"s transform themselves to look like '50s and '60s movie and television characters who seem oddly real-yet are hopelessly behind the times. In Letterland Oliver stumbles into Liberaltown, where he is taken under the wing of the mayor, an L who is the spitting image of John Wayne. When Oliver meets the mayor's daughter, a teenager masquerading as Mr. Ed, the talking horse, she reveals that she can compute herself to look like anyone she chooses-whereupon Oliver produces a picture of Lysander, his secret love. Hilarious and affectionate, White makes us feel at home in a world we never dreamed existed. By the end, smitten by this new place, we are ready to embrace the lunatic Ls living their lives as best they can-with their all too human laughter and laments.
