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Lightning Song
Leroy Dearman is twelve, and he lives on a llama farm in Mississippi. Life is perfect. It's true that his grandfather just died in the attic and that wild dogs kill a baby llama now and then, and it's true that one little sister curses him and the other one wets her pants. But up to the day Uncle Harris moves in, life looks like it's right out of a Walt Disney movie. No wonder the llamas greet each morning with a song. Uncle Harris arrives in a sports car, full of funny stories and new ideas. He manages to persuade Leroy's straitlaced parents to join him for cocktails in the evening. He sets up a pretty grand bachelor pad in the Dearman attic, with a telephone, a TV set, and a stack of Playboy magazines. He is, you might say, Romance itself. Once Uncle Harris moves in, life on the llama farm takes on an entirely different flavor. Leroy discovers those magazines. Electricity fills the Dearman house. Equilibrium tilts, conversation trails off, the atmospheric pressure twists--and lightning strikes. Leroy starts seeing things he's never seen before, like the very gifted baton-twirling teacher, and his world changes forever. Not since PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT has a novel looked so directly, hilariously, and bittersweetly at the heartbreak of puberty.
280 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1997
9 people are currently reading
164 people want to read
About the author
Lewis Nordan
26 books74 followersFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lewis Nordan (August 23, 1939 – April 13, 2012) was an American writer.
Nordan was born to Lemuel and Sara Bayles in Forest, Mississippi, grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi. He received his B.A. at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, his M.A. from Mississippi State University, and his Ph.D. from Auburn University in Alabama. In 1983, at age forty-five, Nordan published his first collection of stories, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair. The collection established him as a writer in the grotesque Southern tradition of William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Flannery O'Connor. It also established a place for Nordan’s fiction, the fictional Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, a small town in the Mississippi Delta based loosely on Nordan’s hometown of Itta Bena.
After the short-story collection The All-Girl Football Team (1986) followed Music of the Swamp (1991), a novel/short-story cycle featuring Nordan's spiritual alter ego, the young Sugar Mecklin, as the protagonist. The book features aspects of magic realism that would become one of Nordan's trademarks, along with a peculiar mix of the tragic and the hilarious.
Wolf Whistle (1993), Nordan's second novel, was both a critical and public success. It won the Southern Book Award and gained him a wider audience. The book deals with one of the most notorious racial incidents in recent Southern history: the murder of Emmett Till.
The novel The Sharpshooter Blues (1995) is a lyrical meditation on America's gun culture, as well as another portrait of the grotesque lives in Itta Bena. With the coming-of-age novel Lightning Song (1997), Nordan moved from Itta Bena to the hill country of Mississippi. The novel still features Nordan's magic Mississippi realism, complete with singing llamas and poetic lightning strikes.
In 2000, Nordan published a "fictional memoir," Boy With Loaded Gun.
Before retiring in 2005, Lewis Nordan lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he taught Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh.
Lewis Nordan (August 23, 1939 – April 13, 2012) was an American writer.
Nordan was born to Lemuel and Sara Bayles in Forest, Mississippi, grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi. He received his B.A. at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, his M.A. from Mississippi State University, and his Ph.D. from Auburn University in Alabama. In 1983, at age forty-five, Nordan published his first collection of stories, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair. The collection established him as a writer in the grotesque Southern tradition of William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Flannery O'Connor. It also established a place for Nordan’s fiction, the fictional Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, a small town in the Mississippi Delta based loosely on Nordan’s hometown of Itta Bena.
After the short-story collection The All-Girl Football Team (1986) followed Music of the Swamp (1991), a novel/short-story cycle featuring Nordan's spiritual alter ego, the young Sugar Mecklin, as the protagonist. The book features aspects of magic realism that would become one of Nordan's trademarks, along with a peculiar mix of the tragic and the hilarious.
Wolf Whistle (1993), Nordan's second novel, was both a critical and public success. It won the Southern Book Award and gained him a wider audience. The book deals with one of the most notorious racial incidents in recent Southern history: the murder of Emmett Till.
The novel The Sharpshooter Blues (1995) is a lyrical meditation on America's gun culture, as well as another portrait of the grotesque lives in Itta Bena. With the coming-of-age novel Lightning Song (1997), Nordan moved from Itta Bena to the hill country of Mississippi. The novel still features Nordan's magic Mississippi realism, complete with singing llamas and poetic lightning strikes.
In 2000, Nordan published a "fictional memoir," Boy With Loaded Gun.
Before retiring in 2005, Lewis Nordan lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he taught Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
December 6, 2013
"You are the oddest child."
Leroy Dearman's mother
Twelve-year-old Leroy is having a mostly idyllic summer. He enjoys nature and the llamas that live on his family's farm. He walks to the store with his younger sisters and the owner gives them free candy. His world is peopled with colorful characters like Screamer McGee who can lick his own penis, and the New People who like to play dress-up and speak with strange accents.
School is out and life is good.
Too bad it's all about to change with the arrival of Uncle Harris. On the run from his wife, Harris moves into the attic and nothing will ever be the same again.
Before Harris's arrival, sex had been little more than a baffling concept to Leroy, but now there is a stack of Playboy magazines upstairs, beckoning him to take a closer look.
Well, what do you know, he couldn't believe his eyes, here was somebody he recognized. It was another picture of the same woman he had seen on the front cover, that poor girl. What had she done with her vest? She'd lost her vest! And where were her pants, for God's sake? What had she done with her pants?
The reality of sex turns out to be even more disturbing than the nudity depicted in those glossy pages. Soon his mother is flirting shamelessly with Uncle Harris. His father may be in love with another woman, and Leroy himself is experiencing weird feelings for a bewitching baton twirler.
This stormy Mississippi summer will leave Leroy gasping for breath and struggling to understand the strange behaviors of the adults around him.
He was driven for the first time in his life to consider the death of his sisters, and his own death. He stood at the beginning of knowing such things, knowing that the means by which he was accustomed to comprehending the world were merely inadequate to the extreme.
Nordan has a very meandering style that some readers may not care for, but on the whole, this is a wonderful read that manages to be both hilarious and heartbreaking.
Leroy Dearman's mother
Twelve-year-old Leroy is having a mostly idyllic summer. He enjoys nature and the llamas that live on his family's farm. He walks to the store with his younger sisters and the owner gives them free candy. His world is peopled with colorful characters like Screamer McGee who can lick his own penis, and the New People who like to play dress-up and speak with strange accents.
School is out and life is good.
Too bad it's all about to change with the arrival of Uncle Harris. On the run from his wife, Harris moves into the attic and nothing will ever be the same again.
Before Harris's arrival, sex had been little more than a baffling concept to Leroy, but now there is a stack of Playboy magazines upstairs, beckoning him to take a closer look.
Well, what do you know, he couldn't believe his eyes, here was somebody he recognized. It was another picture of the same woman he had seen on the front cover, that poor girl. What had she done with her vest? She'd lost her vest! And where were her pants, for God's sake? What had she done with her pants?
The reality of sex turns out to be even more disturbing than the nudity depicted in those glossy pages. Soon his mother is flirting shamelessly with Uncle Harris. His father may be in love with another woman, and Leroy himself is experiencing weird feelings for a bewitching baton twirler.
This stormy Mississippi summer will leave Leroy gasping for breath and struggling to understand the strange behaviors of the adults around him.
He was driven for the first time in his life to consider the death of his sisters, and his own death. He stood at the beginning of knowing such things, knowing that the means by which he was accustomed to comprehending the world were merely inadequate to the extreme.
Nordan has a very meandering style that some readers may not care for, but on the whole, this is a wonderful read that manages to be both hilarious and heartbreaking.
March 1, 2026
Nordan’s writing is always interesting, and leaves the reader never quite sure what he will come up with next. This, almost post-apocalyptic in its background, is oddly relevant today, despite its publication 30 years ago, both in terms of climate fiction of which these days there is plenty, and with its coming of age themes, as it concerns an adolescent boy who is, in effect, groomed and taken advantage of.
A volatile summer in rural Mississippi is seen though the eyes of 12 year old Leroy Dearman, as he views adult events as never before. Lightning storms send fireballs through houses and threaten anyone outside their homes. Whether they provoke the community to behave more strangely is left for the reader to decide, but Leroy witnesses strange sexual goings-on, and people’s personalities changing without explanation.
Leroy’s family live own a llama farm. His uncle comes to stay, recently separated from his wife, and the boy witnesses his flirtations with his mother. He also discovers his uncle’s collection of porn magazines in the loft of the barn. As his own sexual awareness grows he develops a crush on the huge breasted 19 year old that teaches his younger sister’s baton twirling classes.
It’s a really different, daring and strange piece of fiction that could be viewed as a metaphor for the turbulence of an adolescent boy going through puberty.
A volatile summer in rural Mississippi is seen though the eyes of 12 year old Leroy Dearman, as he views adult events as never before. Lightning storms send fireballs through houses and threaten anyone outside their homes. Whether they provoke the community to behave more strangely is left for the reader to decide, but Leroy witnesses strange sexual goings-on, and people’s personalities changing without explanation.
Leroy’s family live own a llama farm. His uncle comes to stay, recently separated from his wife, and the boy witnesses his flirtations with his mother. He also discovers his uncle’s collection of porn magazines in the loft of the barn. As his own sexual awareness grows he develops a crush on the huge breasted 19 year old that teaches his younger sister’s baton twirling classes.
It’s a really different, daring and strange piece of fiction that could be viewed as a metaphor for the turbulence of an adolescent boy going through puberty.
June 30, 2019
I have been amazed and entertained by the two previous Nordan books I've read (The Sharpshooter Blues and Wolf Whistle). This one, no. I didn't finish it and won't be going back to it.
The problem wasn't so much that what I read of it lacked the humor and pathos of the other books--although it did. It wasn't so much that it lacked the depth of the others--although it did.
The problem was that it messed up the history on a very important point. There is an entire section dealing with how the mother in the book becomes smitten by the story of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro (Italian Prime Minister). A quick peek at Wikipedia shows that Moro was kidnapped on 16 March 1978 and his body was found on 9 May 1978. During this time, not only was the main character, a twelve year old boy, not in school, it was freakin' summer as far as the book was concerned. Summer? In March?
My rule is that if an author doesn't care enough about his/her work to do the research, then this reader doesn't care enough to read the book!
The problem wasn't so much that what I read of it lacked the humor and pathos of the other books--although it did. It wasn't so much that it lacked the depth of the others--although it did.
The problem was that it messed up the history on a very important point. There is an entire section dealing with how the mother in the book becomes smitten by the story of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro (Italian Prime Minister). A quick peek at Wikipedia shows that Moro was kidnapped on 16 March 1978 and his body was found on 9 May 1978. During this time, not only was the main character, a twelve year old boy, not in school, it was freakin' summer as far as the book was concerned. Summer? In March?
My rule is that if an author doesn't care enough about his/her work to do the research, then this reader doesn't care enough to read the book!
June 19, 2018
Brief, strange, feverish, fantastical. In the vein of American magical realism, with a borrowed element from To Kill a Mockingbird that makes the whole thing seem like a parallel South universe. Punctuated by long, digressive monologues, with one surreal scene at the center of the book that, structurally, centers and concentrates the dollops of strangeness intruding on the proceedings on either side. In the varied glimpses of sex, longing and confusion as experienced by various characters, the whole thing reflects the unknowableness of parents to their children, and vice versa. I read Wolf Whistle by this author during college and have returned to it, awed and grateful, over the years, but this one seems lighter, more glancing and ephemeral, less immediately resonant and less globally tragic than WW. Still, I was glad to wade into Nordan's weird currents once again, and I want to read more of his.
October 8, 2012
I will be reading more Mr. Nordan.
July 28, 2018
Moving book , great characters,well written, intelligent. This is the first of many of his I will read.
Read
October 30, 2024ummmm
September 9, 2014
Can't say as I liked the story, I am not even sure that I even liked the way it was presented, but there was this something, just enough of a something for me to want to give this book four stars. Most I can come up with is that I became invested in it, I wanted badly enough to know what happened that I knocked it off in seven days. Now I know there are many of you saying "SEVEN DAYS? What did he do read it or write it?" But you should know that I have difficulties with dyslexia. Well at I believe I have trouble with dyslexia, and if I think I have trouble with dyslexia, then I have trouble with dyslexia. Which interestingly enough reminds me of something meaningful that happens in this book; to Leroy's mom, Uncle Harris looks good. And if Mrs. Dearman thinks he looks good, then he is good ... until she believes he isn't.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 1, 2011
This is a different one for Nordan. Not that it is any less developed a story, but it doesn't have quite the same comic tone that the Arrow Catcher (or related) stories have. This book seems to have a darker core. Still hopeful in nature, but not exactly as comic. Still imaginative, detailed, and wonderful. As always, Nordan does not disappoint.
February 8, 2010
This was different.......... I don't regret reading it.
November 14, 2010
This was one of those hard to put down novels for me. Super funny dark humor but light hearted at the same time. I will surely read more of Nordan.
March 2, 2011
In search of new authors I was directed to Lewis Nordan. Not my normal type of fiction but an excellent, visceral writer. Interested in reading more of his work.
July 8, 2012
Just reread this and it's still perfect.
December 24, 2014
I miss Buddy. I hear him in his books. Loved it.
June 14, 2016
great funny writing. a slow pace but it bubbles along. a great gumbo. couldn't stop reading. love this writer.
Read
September 11, 2016so far i like it a lot.
October 11, 2013
loved it. great fun writing.
Read
December 24, 2017I think Swami Don's final remarks, maybe even the parents' final argument, squandered the power of lightning/electricity metaphor and diminished the devastating effects of the loss of electricity and being overwhelmed by it. the ball of fire was a nice touch, too.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews