Imagine owning a restaurant near the jungles of Thailand that sits upon the most legendary mystical road in the world. Legend states that whomever walks upon Loi Kroh Road will be forever changed or shall never be seen or heard from again. In fact, the English translation of "Loi Kroh Road" is "Wash Your Bad Luck Away". Larry, the main character, is seductively lured to this world famous street to purchase this restaurant. The restaurant serves as a place where he observes world travelers such as himself as well as locals who discover their fate upon this historic road. He is on a journey to discover his mission in life as he is guided by a ghostly figure that appeared to him as a child. On his adventures, he comes face to face with his greatest fear, his lingering questions of mortality and his soul's lonely reflection
Professional Reviews
Wild and Wonderful
By Revvell P. Revati, N.H.E. "http://podcast.The... (Toluca Lake, Ca) - See all my reviews
I read this book in order to interview the authors and I am soooo glad I did. It is a fascinating read about a place I never knew existed...Loi Kroh Rd in the city of Chiang Mai in the country of Thailand... and it's inhabitants, including Larry. This is his story.
Larry was raised on a farm with a strict father and feels the need to run from being trapped on the farm. He believed he had a mission in life and is guided by a ghostly figure which appeared to him when he was a child. On his adventures, he sees loneliness in all the people around him. He falls out of love losing the only real love he ever had and, in reality, it is his own mortality and his own loneliness which he fears.
An excerpt:
"As Larry stood on that lonely road, his eyes drawn away to the distance, he soaked up the beautiful smoky-grey hills, rich with jungle growth, where fields of color raced up to the thick base of the trees to bow in reverence. Where the most prominent and interesting objects to interrupt the flatness were the old village houses and the odd buffalo lazily mingling with fields of rice stalks, soybeans and wild flowers. Never mind the stream of heat that rested heavily upon every living thing. The lush of the jungle craved the perspiration of humidity's breath."
As you can tell by the above paragraph, this book puts one directly in the feeling of the moment.
What's unusual about this book is that it was a collaboration by two authors who've never met and who've never even spoken by phone ~ one being in China and the other in America.
Once I started this book it was tough to put it down. Once down, I kept coming back to it. Expect to see The "Mango Tree Cafe, Loi Kroh Rd." as a movie in the not-too-distant future.
Revvell
Tasty Mango Tree Cafe
By Barbara Sharp Milbourn "writer and editor" (Nashville) - See all my reviews
Alan Solomon and Taryn Simpson, in The Mango Tree Café Loi Kroh Road, present the life of Larry. We both meet and say goodbye to Larry as an old man sitting in his cane chair on the veranda of his Chiangmai home peering into the past and future. What's in-between is an entertaining and sensitive story of a man's awakening to find and serve the truth.
Larry, a teenager, heeds the words of his father to leave the small New Zealand village so that his achievement will be greater than ". . . watching the grass grow and releasing the pressure from the udders of cows. . ." His travels take him to Thailand, "Land of a Thousand Smiles" and to the fertile beauty of the Mae Rim region where the solitude of the jungle stands in sharp contrast to the noise and bustle of Chiangmai's Loi Kroh Road. On this famous and hypnotic road, the powerful and the powerless come to wash bad luck away in drink, prostitution, and anonymity.
In one of its bars, Larry has a vision (not his first) that points him to partake of the road and feed it a different food, to experience a different kind of love, and to acknowledge and embrace his purposefulness.
I'm convinced that roads like this and their seedy, gritty dynamic exist around the world. What I especially liked about The Mango Tree Café Loi Kroh Road is that it places us in the pocket of Larry's shirt closest to his heart. We are standing with him in the press of his life, peering into and out of the café, seeing it for what it is, meeting its characters, smelling its smells, tasting its strange humor and barely disguised grief.
We move back and forth through time and reality to the accident scene, and eventually come to rest as the realization of who he is and why he is here presents itself. Through Larry we are reminded of how little we are really known and understood by others--and often ourselves--and how his seeking is hardly different from our own if we will but stare into its face. Enjoy The Mango Tree Café Loi Kroh Road.
This is a GREAT Book!
This is a great book written with pure raw emotion and feeling. It is made even more poignant because of the author's intimate knowledge of the area.
It is one of those books that you will always cherish and read many times over.
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