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- THE BOOGIE TRAPP Reviewed By Karen Dahood of Bookpleasures.com
THE BOOGIE TRAPP Reviewed By Karen Dahood of Bookpleasures.com
- By Karen Dahood
- Published April 1, 2014
- GENERAL FICTION REVIEWS
Karen Dahood
Reviewer Karen Dahood : Karen lives in Tucson, AZ. After 35 years as a writer for businesses and nonprofits, she has turned to writing mysteries,the subtext of which addresses ageism, unpreparedness for aging, and America's wealth of experience and wisdom. Learn more about eldersleuth Sophie George at the Website Moxie Cosmos; Making Sense of Life Through Writing.
View all articles by Karen Dahood
Author: Kerry
Copeland Smith
Publisher: The Peppertree Press, 2012
ISBN:
978-1-61493-112-6 (HC)
Presented as an old man’s confession,
THE BOOGIE TRAPP starts off harmlessly as a boyhood memory of the
1950s in rural Alabama, near Birmingham. These are days marked by
slingshots, “dope” (soda pop), blood brothers, flat tires, and
racial prejudice without politics. Kerry Copeland Smith gives his
72-year-old narrator a beguiling voice, and for someone approximately
his age, the details of his setting and activities in Black Creek
bring back a time when 13-year-old kids enjoyed relative freedom
between hours in school, got away with as much as they could, and
were tolerated and quietly watched over by church-going
adults.
Inseparable buddies, Boogie and Trapper, are planning
to score with the girls at a special party being thrown by one of
them on a Saturday night. Boogie gets slicked up early in the day
and, evading too many questions, tells his family he is going to a
friend’s house. Taking off on his bike to meet his best friend at
the home of a young mother who is not shy, he hopes to see her
breastfeed. Later they go to a store and exchange jokes with two
black boys. All of this time (and it is a long windup), we are
made gradually aware of the social attitudes in the town, and that
these two and their families are good people in rough times handed
out by a coal mining economy in a segregationist South.
But
then the author gets down to business. There is a man in and out of
town about whom rumors fly; he likes little boys. They happen to come
across him in a strange car. He asks them to help him out in exchange
for five dollars. His truck is stuck in the creek. Thinking
about the money, the boys agree.
About one-quarter into this
meandering tale of bravery in the face of pedophilia, I began to feel
sick and to question the novelist’s intent. If I hadn’t promised
to review it, I would never have chosen to go beyond this point. It
might be because I am old and female and found the smaller
revelations, such as how boys talked about their body parts, enough
titillation for my taste. But I continued, because the author’s
word crafting is masterful. As I said, he draws you in and tells you
cultural things you never knew before, and about places you’ve
never been. The bulk of it is mesmerizing and terrifying. His
description of how to slip through a wet woods, gradually becoming
cold, scared, with filthy and torn clothes, and crawl around on rocks
along a creek without being seen, are moment-by-moment, hand by hand.
I could imagine the film.
But not quite. It wouldn’t pass
the censors as is. Really. The language alone goes way beyond what is
needed to impress upon the reader the depravity of this villain. I
won’t say more because I am sure there are some of you who will
read the book out of curiosity, and because the ending is perhaps
somewhat redeeming. Besides, most of the other reviews are five
stars.
As I write this, LinkedIn is sponsoring a discussion
among Fiction Writers and Editors, “Are we glamorizing violence in
our works of fiction because it sells?” In general, I would
say “too often,” but I feel certain this book is not a case in
point. I think the author is sincere. Kerry Copeland Smith has
enormous talent. In this novel he cleverly moves back and forth from
the past to the present, so that you become absolutely convinced
everything he-as-narrator says about himself and his book project is
true. In an interview on blogspot.com (January 16, 2013), he says his
second book will be very different, but he also says he may follow up
on Boogie in the future.
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