Reviews for Lightning Song

The average rating for Lightning Song based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-11-28 00:00:00 David Fistein "You are the oddest child." Leroy Dearman's mother Twelve-year-old Leroy is having a mostly idyllic summer. He enjoys nature and the llamas that live on his family's farm. He walks to the store with his younger sisters and the owner gives them free candy. His world is peopled with colorful characters like Screamer McGee who can lick his own penis, and the New People who like to play dress-up and speak with strange accents. School is out and life is good. Too bad it's all about to change with the arrival of Uncle Harris. On the run from his wife, Harris moves into the attic and nothing will ever be the same again. Before Harris's arrival, sex had been little more than a baffling concept to Leroy, but now there is a stack of Playboy magazines upstairs, beckoning him to take a closer look. Well, what do you know, he couldn't believe his eyes, here was somebody he recognized. It was another picture of the same woman he had seen on the front cover, that poor girl. What had she done with her vest? She'd lost her vest! And where were her pants, for God's sake? What had she done with her pants? The reality of sex turns out to be even more disturbing than the nudity depicted in those glossy pages. Soon his mother is flirting shamelessly with Uncle Harris. His father may be in love with another woman, and Leroy himself is experiencing weird feelings for a bewitching baton twirler. This stormy Mississippi summer will leave Leroy gasping for breath and struggling to understand the strange behaviors of the adults around him. He was driven for the first time in his life to consider the death of his sisters, and his own death. He stood at the beginning of knowing such things, knowing that the means by which he was accustomed to comprehending the world were merely inadequate to the extreme. Nordan has a very meandering style that some readers may not care for, but on the whole, this is a wonderful read that manages to be both hilarious and heartbreaking.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-07-07 00:00:00 Auridenise Rodriguez I have been amazed and entertained by the two previous Nordan books I've read (The Sharpshooter Blues and Wolf Whistle). This one, no. I didn't finish it and won't be going back to it. The problem wasn't so much that what I read of it lacked the humor and pathos of the other books--although it did. It wasn't so much that it lacked the depth of the others--although it did. The problem was that it messed up the history on a very important point. There is an entire section dealing with how the mother in the book becomes smitten by the story of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro (Italian Prime Minister). A quick peek at Wikipedia shows that Moro was kidnapped on 16 March 1978 and his body was found on 9 May 1978. During this time, not only was the main character, a twelve year old boy, not in school, it was freakin' summer as far as the book was concerned. Summer? In March? My rule is that if an author doesn't care enough about his/her work to do the research, then this reader doesn't care enough to read the book!