LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
Boasting a distinctive slick, quick, comic voice, Lach’s Langdimania debut lets readers loose in the imagination of a twelve-year-old boy. Having something of a madcap road-trip vibe, it melds imaginative flights of fancy, fantasy, and the realities of junior high life with psychedelic invention. Think The Wizard of Oz meets modern pre-teen movies.
While searching a Manhattan toy store for the perfect present for his last pre-teen birthday, Army (full name Abraham Armstrong Allen) selects a blue plastic ball (AKA a Thingamajig) from a basket. According to the sign, it “could do anything” and, thanks to Army’s wild imagination, it pretty much can. He tells his school peers that the Thingamajig “keeps all of reality in motion” and decides it’s a “Langdim finder” — short for language and dimension. From this, Army comes up with the idea that it can transport him to other dimensions, in which he can understand the inhabitants’ languages. And from this, he fantasises about being king of Langdimania. Thusly, ideas escalate in Army’s mind, and it’s not long before the whole school wants in on his imperial role-playing game.
As might be expected, things don’t end there, and Army winds up slipping between two worlds, on a quest to save The Girl, while also hoping to bag the Scarecrow role in the school production of (appropriately enough) The Wizard of Oz. It’s fast, it’s funny, and feels akin to watching a pre-teen movie driven by childhood adventures and pre-teen thought processes.
Langdimania is available to buy here at £8.99.
Joanne Owen
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Langdimania Synopsis
If you listened to music in the nineties and early noughties and haven’t heard of Lach (pronounced “Latch”) then a quick online search will have you wondering how on earth this can be. Now the Edinburgh resident and bona fide music legend has written his first novel, a genre-busting fantasy adventure for young adults with two heroes – one boy one girl – at its heart.
Langdimania has as its hero a high-school boy named Army, whose quest -- involving a talking pig, a floating girl and his trusty Langdim Finder, which transports him between his two worlds of the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’ -- is to discover what this ‘imagined’ world can mean, and how it can be aligned with his ‘real’ world experience. Oh, and, in classic teenage style, to secure the lead in the school play and gain the attention of his dream girl, who becomes a hero of equal stature throughout the course of the novel.
Langdimania is a novel that, for young readers and adult readers of young-adult fiction alike, asks as many questions as it offers answers and raises weighty themes, including: identity and sense of self; otherness and difference; power and control; objective reality and subjective personal experience; moral accountability; teenage mental health; the discovery of romantic love; and pa-rental presence (or absence) and its effects – to name but a few.
Langdimania is available to buy here at £8.99.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781909797871 |
| Publication date: |
6th April 2023 |
| Author: |
Lach |
| Publisher: |
The Book Whisperers |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
224 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Young Adult Fiction
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| Other Genres: |
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| Recommendations: |
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Author
About Lach
A New Yorker by birth, Lach established the Antifolk music and arts movement in the 1980s, in reaction to the remnants of the folk music of the 1960s, and has been credited as a key influence on artists as well-known as Beck, The Moldy Peaches, Regina Spektor and Suzanne Vega, to name but a few. He recently made a cameo appearance in the much-heralded new documentary about the New York music scene, Meet Me in the Bathroom, and is featured in countless books on the music scene.
Having established himself as a musician and ringleader of the Antifolk movement, running cult venue The Fort and helping budding artists to launch their careers at venues like NYC’s East Village landmark venue Sidewalk Café, Lach made the move across the pond in the early 2000s to pursue his comedy career at the Edinburgh Fringe and went on to perform at venues like The Stand, Gilded Balloon and Voodoo Rooms, and touring the UK with his one-man show. His move to the UK was documented in a BBC Radio Scotland half-hour special and his monologue series The Lach Chronicles became a three-part BBC Radio 4 hit and listed as Top Radio Pick in every major UK paper.
Now, Lach has turned his creative attention to fiction and his debut, Langdimania, comes from very personal experiences: a father telling his son bedtime stories; a husband mourning the loss of his beloved wife; a grown man trying to make sense of his childhood experiences and his own unique brain and imagination; and an artist who is compelled constantly to extend the limits of his creativity.
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