Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan
Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The death of Bobo, the seeing power of that demon eye even after he is dead, as Solon moves him away from his killing ground – a fourteen-year-old child – remains one of the great passages of fiction I have ever read. In scanning other reviews of this book I note a few statements of disbelief that such hate should exist in the world, adult monsters killing an innocent like this one over an idle remark that sullied the purity of a white woman in Mississippi. Maybe the hate exists because the disbelief in it hides it so well in the everyday. Lewis Nordan was so seized by the story of Emmett Till, the real child who died for this crime, so famously, that he created this long elegy and examination of the heart of the small place that committed the act that set fire to the world, the story still told, an example of what one people will do to another in the name of superiority. Nordan reached moments like Bobo’s death in his writing almost without effort, in clear, chisel-sharp sentences. He deserves to be remembered for all that he wrote.