Peter Leroy struggles to win the affections of the toothsome Patti Fiorenza while keeping his mother's hopes and his mother's boat afloat.
Ella Leroy dreams of escaping the dreary routine of her 1950s wife-and-mom life. Without telling her husband, she enlists her son Peter and his locally-notorious girlfriend Patti in a scheme to buy a run-down clamboat and re-invent it as an elegant cruising vessel for summer people in the bayside town of Babbington, Long Island. But after they've bought the boat, Peter discovers that it is slowly sinking.
"[A] bittersweet tale of adolescence recollected in tranquility. . . . Glorious stuff."
Kirkus Reviews
"Raucous, wise, and great fun, this is simply not to be missed."
Nancy Pearl, Booklist
"The reader feels flattered and privileged to be invited to join Kraft's remarkable, ongoing dance of time and memory."
Richard Gehr, Newsday
"A hilarious riff on Don Quixote, on the desire for fame, the need for success, the power of fantasy."
Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe
"As books by Eric Kraft usually are, Inflating a Dog is simultaneously delightful, provocative, poignant and deeply satisfying . . . packed to the gunwales with the incendiary hungers, slippery bravado and rampant uncertainties of adolescence. . . . proves once again that Eric Kraft is a writer of magical verbal and narrative invention. The novel's various threads, its complications of character and plot, its reality-bending notions of showing and telling snap together, finally, with a gentle, inevitable, tear-inducing click. . . . Inflating a Dog is downright elevating."
Frederic Koeppel
Memphis Commercial Appeal
"A sprightly, sly, sophisticated entertainment, light enough to digest in a long summer evening . . . quintessential Kraft, showing his regard for the word-as-object, a thing to be revealed at just the right moment, then left for the reader to examine."
Richard Grant
The Washington Post
"Fascinating and sophisticated."
Jennifer Reese, The New York Times Book Review
"The best description of sex appeal anywhere, ever."
Peter Jon Shuler
