The King of Lakeside

<p>A prairie town is a great place to live if you love beer and hockey and don't mind having a demeaning nickname. Lakeside is that kind of place. It's a typical rural community where everyone knows everyone else's business and people have long memories.</p><p><br></p><p>Ross Garrison's life in Lakeside alternates between momentous challenges and long periods of comfortable stagnation. He makes the best of what little the town has to offer for a social life but he is often forced to navigate around the hostility and racism that simmers in the small isolated community.</p><p><br></p><p>He goes through the motions of participating in the adolescent beer-fueled culture but can't crawl out from under a humiliating event from the past. Much of <em>The King of Lakeside</em> revolves around the looming twenty-year high school reunion that will drag Ross back to a terrible night where much of his identity was defined.</p><p><br></p><p><em>The King of Lakeside</em> is a narrative about arrested development and social confinement but it's also a story of awakening and redemption set in a community rich with the elements both good and bad that give color to the small-town experience.</p>