Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes

★★★★

A 12-year-old black boy named Jerome is killed by a white police officer. The book opens with Jerome's death. It's a first-person narrative, and both chapters and time alternate between Jerome narrating events after his death as a ghost, and Jerome narrating events before his death as they unfolded while he was alive. As a ghost, Jerome watches his family mourn, and he gets to know both the police officer's daughter, who struggles to come to terms with her father's actions, and Emmett Till, who tells Jerome his story.

Jerome is just a regular boy, but sadder than the average main character of a children's book, because even though he's bullied - which is common in children's books - he doesn't have any friends. This detail stood out to me, because characters in books always have at least one or two good friends, but when we meet Jerome, he really had no friends.

I appreciated having the window into the police officer's family, which I didn't expect.

The writing is evocative, sometimes poetic. Other times sentences seem abbreviated, almost cut short. I've read a couple other books by Jewell Parker Rhodes, and this just seems to be her style.

As I read this book, I was not quite sure how to categorize it. It's a children's book, available in the library's "Y" section, and yet I think some kids would get more out of it by reading it in middle school, or even high school. On the one hand, there is a lot of difficult content that even adults have a hard time processing; I teared up every few pages. Part of me feels like maybe children in elementary school shouldn't be "exposed" to this kind of heavy truth at so young an age. But then right away I know that is my privilege talking; the black victims of police brutality, and their families and friends, don't get to choose when they are exposed to racism and gun violence and murder. Jewell Parker Rhodes actually says herself, in the afterword, that her "hope is that parents and teachers will read Ghost Boys with their children and students." (p. 206) So maybe that's it; this book is an important and valuable read for all Americans, but it's best if kids have someone they can talk about the book with, and ask questions.