Standing in the Rainbow » (Abridged)

From plowing into a bank drive-thru for Candid Camera to getting an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of her second novel, Fannie Flagg's road to stardom has been a smidge unconventional. But, as the critics note, she serves up the literary equivalent of "big, juicy Middle American pie" in such novels as Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café and Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

Along with Neighbor Dorothy, the lady with the smile in her voice, whose daily radio broadcasts keep us delightfully informed on all the local news, we also meet Bobby, her ten-year-old son, destined to live a thousand lives, most of them in his imagination; Norma and Macky Warren and their ninety-eight-year-old Aunt Elner; the oddly sexy and charismatic Hamm Sparks and the two women who love him as differently as night and day. Then there is Tot Whooten; Beatrice Woods, the Little Blind Songbird; Cecil Figgs, the Funeral King; and the fabulous Minnie Oatman. The time is 1946 until the present. The town is Elmwood Springs, Missouri, right in the middle of the country, in the midst of the mostly joyous transition from war to peace, aiming toward a dizzyingly bright future.

Book Magazine

In small-town Elmwood Springs, Missouri, on the heels of World War II, life holds promise for little boys like Bobby Smith. America is a nation of "Coca-Cola, chocolate- covered peanuts, jukeboxes, Oxydol, Ivory Snow, oleomargarine, and the Atomic Bomb" and is "bigger, better, richer, and stronger" than anyplace else. Bobby's dad is the town's pharmacist, and his mom hosts the state's most popular morning radio program from the family's living room. This ambitious effort from the author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe spans fifty years fraught with scandal and romance. The Smiths and their friends and neighbors display a kind of big-hearted optimism that has the potential to reduce their story to sentimental mush. Flagg's knack for humor and observation lend the characters a depth that rescues what might otherwise have been a typical, dramatic saga. For all its myriad twists and turns, this tale never takes an easy way out.