What I'm Reading

This book was strongly recommended to me by someone on my Ohio trip. I was able to buy a 1 cent "like new" version from Amazon where you pay one cent plus a few dollars (three or four?) for shipping.

 

The name of the book is from a little poem which I'd never heard to teach kids how to spell Mississippi that starts: M, I crooked letter, crooked letter, I,  crooked letter, crooked letter, etc. The person who recommended the book was surprised I'd never heard the poem, as she had.

 

And here's how Amazon describes it. I'm about 30 pages in.

 

Edgar Award-winning author Tom Franklin returns with his most accomplished and resonant novel so far—an atmospheric drama set in rural Mississippi. In the late 1970s, Larry Ott and Silas "32" Jones were boyhood pals. Their worlds were as different as night and day: Larry, the child of lower-middle-class white parents, and Silas, the son of a poor, single black mother. Yet for a few months the boys stepped outside of their circumstances and shared a special bond. But then tragedy struck: Larry took a girl on a date to a drive-in movie, and she was never heard from again. She was never found and Larry never confessed, but all eyes rested on him as the culprit. The incident shook the county—and perhaps Silas most of all. His friendship with Larry was broken, and then Silas left town.

More than twenty years have passed. Larry, a mechanic, lives a solitary existence, never able to rise above the whispers of suspicion. Silas has returned as a constable. He and Larry have no reason to cross paths until another girl disappears and Larry is blamed again. And now the two men who once called each other friend are forced to confront the past they've buried and ignored for decades.