Every book has words, is comprised of words, but this book is about words. The ones that 16-year-old Robert Johnson used when his charter school teachers, who treat optimism as a kind of hygiene, told him he should confess to the murder of Lillie Scott, a hero of the rebuilding of New Orleans, who hired at her restaurant those down on their luck. The words the boy can’t or won’t say about what really happened, which barely matters anyway since the system will drag him in now or later, formed as it is of “strange empty words in the shape of language but without any meaning.” And the words that are unsaid as Lillie “[lies] down in the street so noiselessly, slow like a sheet in the breeze flutters to the ground.” Shoulder to the wheel of all this is Ben Alder, a former rabbinical student and son of a linguist, and his dude of dudes, Grand Old Dude of York, Mayor Van Dude of Dudetown, Boris Pasternak. These public defenders ask for every case involving a child, and Ben becomes Robert’s lawyer. All the boy wants is to talk to his dad. But Ben doesn’t tell him that he’s also representing the father, who, unknown to the boy, is in the same jail. Ben has “no questions that are small enough for the courtroom,” but still wrangles his fear and his clients through the morass to a satisfying outcome, one that will leave readers with large questions of their own, mainly about this country’s treatment of Black boys. Debut novelist Perry, a former New Orleans public defender, has wonderfully distilled a world of hurt onto the page.
