Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel by Drew Gummerson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Seven Nights just isn’t long enough – I could have happily wallowed for at least a fortnight in the grubby environs of the Flamingo Hotel.
Fizzily paced from the outset, it’s a tale of oddbods and total sods, of a central character who could well have been the adult incarnation of Adrian Mole if only Sue Townsend’s hero had learnt how to communicate in Morse Code by flashing his bum.
pub. Bearded Badger Publishing Company
photo: Ross Lowe
Drew Gummerson is a writer every bit as sharp and observant as his much-missed fellow Leicesterian, and his ability to draw both cheeky humour and bleak tragedy from the hapless existence of the protagonist is very much on point. There are multiple and delightful uses of the word ‘bum’ in this book, but it rarely hits a bum note, if at all.
As drudgery gives way to humiliation over the course of the week, we’re taken through fantasies of better, impossible lives imagined but never lived, while all the time subtle seeds are sown in the dreams, clues which eventually flower into a shocking reality.
Told entirely in the second person and never once taking its foot off the gas, it’s an ambitious piece of work which succeeds in being something refreshingly different, worthwhile and fun.
Check yourself in, unpack and enjoy.
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Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel by Drew Gummerson is published by
Bearded Badger Publishing Company.
You can buy a copy of the book directly from their website,
https://www.beardedbadgerpublishing.com/
Review originally published on Goodreads.com
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