Ghost Boys By a Whisper, But Don't Sleep on Dread Nation

I finished Ghost Boys about 9:00 one evening over the break and kind of casually passed it to my daughter as she was wandering to her room. She finished it that night, and while she has the passing familiarity with Black Lives Matters that comes with existing on social media in this day and age, she had never heard of Emmett Till. That’s a pretty important reason right there for why we should get this book into the hands of our kids. This is a book that would be accessible for students in upper elementary right up to grade twelve and I think it would resonate - and maybe educate - their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, as well. As was the case with my daughter’s experience, I think it is a book whose power comes not so much from the strength of its prose or even a stirring narrative, so much as from what it offers moving forward. I don’t think our kids will finish thinking about this book when they are done reading it, and even if that means they pay a little more attention to the alarming shit-show south of the border, that can only help us all, particularly in a province that seems sometimes eager to embrace the darker impulses on display there. Ghost Boys is not an overly subtle book, but then there is nothing subtle about the legacy of systemic racism that it spotlights. Ultimately, though, the power of the novel doesn’t come so much from forcing us to look at the unimaginable (and yet, somehow unconscionably common) - battered, bullet-ridden bodies of children -but in asking us to contemplate a way forward. I was a bit skeptical of the ghost trope, but what it does (as every good ghost story should) is allow us to see something we wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, in everyday life. Jerome is the most literal victim in the novel, but through his eyes we see the horrifying scope of victimization stemming from his death, including the police officer who shot him and, perhaps most powerfully, that officer’s daughter. Ghost Boys will be an introduction to some, and an affirmation for others, of how a legacy of systemic racism continues to be the defining feature of the American Republic, perhaps more importantly, however, it points us to the only true salve for wounds this deep: empathy. 

All that being said, I don’t want to leave here without a shout out to Dread Nation. Zombies have never really been my thing and I’m kind of so-so on those modern-historical fusions where we’re thrust firmly into a historical period, but everyone still has the cool-kid swagger of 2020 (If you do like such things, check out Dickinson on Apple TV) , but I liked this book. Jane is both every high school girl you’ve ever met and the toughest human being you’d ever want to meet, and her marriage of strength and vulnerability is actually inspiring. There isn’t a ton of heavy lifting necessary to enter into this alternate reality and in the process of doing so, Ireland actually asks you to re-engage with the racial and sexual dynamics of this historical era in a way that hi-lights its particular relevance to our own. It actually treads some of the same ground - arguably in more subtle ways - as Ghost Boys, and it borrows from a range of different genres - romance, historical fiction, Big L. literature etc. - in such a way that I think it would also appeal to a surprisingly diverse audience. Dread Nation might actually be just as good a book (and I am pretty certain it will be a better film) but Ghost Boys is unquestionably the more important book, and the one we need to get into the hands of our kids, both for what it shows them and what it asks of them.