Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes

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Reviewed by: Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes Wesley Jacques Rhodes, Jewell ParkerGhost Boys. Little, 2018 192p Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-316-26228-6 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-316-26225-5 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6-9 This accessible title begins in media res, with two shots already fired from a white policeman's weapon and twelve-year-old Jerome Rogers laid out on some Chicago sidewalk as his spirit detaches from his small Black body. As a ghost, Jerome narrates both the aftermath of the shooting and the events that led up to it in familiar beats—his home in a low-income, predominantly Black and Latino community, the presumed threat of his toy gun, a preliminary hearing that yields no actual charges, a mourning and weary family. When the officer's daughter, Sarah, is the only one that sees him and other "ghost boys," young Black boys killed by race-based violence, however, Jerome digs deeper for meaning. The thematic pairing of Jerome, the newest ghost boy, with Sarah, who is white and more economically fortunate but similar to Jerome in age and stature, is provocative, especially as an inverted parallel to the experience of the leader of the ghost boys, Emmett Till (though it does unfortunately reify a gender and race dynamic where only Black boys can be victims and only white girls can help). As in her Ninth Ward (BCCB 10/10), Rhodes evokes the surreal and the disturbing to interrogate current events, here to engage the illogic of child killings in an account that's frightening both as a ghost story and as a political statement. The haunting of the ghost boys throughout all of Chicago, even the spaces Jerome never got to see in a life constrained by inequity, is an effective vehicle for a story that is disheartening in its familiarity, and the implication that murdered Black boys have a sort of transcendental burden to carry makes for a striking story. WJ Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois