5 Stars - Highly Recommended / The Next Best Book
Pages: 347
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Releasing: Sept 2016
We're living in some seriously fucked up times. When were you last able to turn on the TV without hearing about another act of outrageous violence? Another robbery, another rape, another shooting? So many people in the wrong place at the wrong time, so many needlessly dying. So many protests and riots. So many speaking, screaming, shouting, vying to be heard. So many others not willing to listen, blocking it out, shutting down, making excuses.
Holy fuck you guys, James Boice's The Shooting could not have been more perfectly timed! In the midst of our own recent crazytimes with gun violence, Boice brings us Clayton Kabede, the 15 year old son of a black immigrant couple who is shot to death one evening when he enters the apartment of Lee Fisher, a rich, white, reclusive gun enthusiast. Who can prove Clayton wasn't just another street thug looking for trouble? Do we believe Lee was just protecting his infant child from a dangerous intruder? Will the media just paint it as another hate crime?
What about this... why did it happen? What forces pushed these two men together? What choices had they made that propelled them towards this moment?
Boice is determined to leave no stone unturned and we're sitting front and center, nearly drowning in the ripple effect this act of gun violence has created. We're not just talking about its impact on the friends and families of the shooter and his victim, but on a much grander scale. This is the shit the media never shares.
Within its pages, we find ourselves bounced between the past and present lives of the many people who have been touched, however briefly, by both Clayton and Lee, for better or for worse, and how those interactions shaped who they had both become in that dark moment inside Lee's apartment, right before the gun flashed and that first shot was fired.
A poignant reminder that even media monsters were once men and that, sometimes, even the most unfortunate circumstances can have a silver lining.
Boice continues to reinvent reality through his fiction. This is our world, our now, our future, if we don't get up off our asses and do something different. This is our wake-up call.
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