Meet the most hated woman in Jenny Sanders (also known as the country’s most successful gun control advocate). On her way to New York City, to the site of yet another shooting, she encounters one of her many opponents. Their shocking collision will plunge you directly into the world of James Boice’s fourth and most urgent novel.
It begins with Lee Fisher, a boy raised as a patriot and native son who cannot escape the influence of his troubled father. The heir to a massive family fortune, Lee struggles to find his place in the world. By the time a stranger walks through the unlocked door of his New York City penthouse, Lee is as terrified by his own isolation as he is by the threat posed by the intruder. The stranger — unarmed teenager Clayton Kabede — carries with him an immigrant story as profound as the American experience itself.
Refugees and militia men, Russian physicists and inner city teens, Rikers Island inmates and Second Amendment repealists, beat cops and $1000-per-hour defense attorneys — James Boice delivers an unprecedented portrait of contemporary America through the prism of a single shooting.
Novels, short stories. The Good and the Ghastly, MVP NoVA, Esquire, McSweeney’s, Fiction, Salt Hill. NYC. Boston. Cambridge. Northern Virginia. www.jamesboice.com
Read 7/20/16 - 7/23/16 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.
Adapted from the book jacket: Boice delivers an unprecedented portrait of contemporary America through the prism of a single shooting. Jenny Sanders is the most hated woman in America (Also known as the country’s most successful gun control advocate). Lee Fisher cannot escape the influence of his troubled father. The heir to a massive family fortune, Lee struggles to find his place in the world. By the time a stranger walks through the unlocked door of his New York City penthouse, Lee is as terrified by his own isolation as he is by the threat posed by the intruder. The stranger - unarmed teenager Clayton Kabede – carries with him an immigrant story as profound as the American experience itself.
My reactions There is no question that America’s gun culture needs to be examined and understood, if it is ever to be changed. Boice turns a critical eye on BOTH sides of this issue, while clearly remaining on the side of gun control. There are no easy answers here, but Boice poses some important questions.
I like that he manages to give us very complex characters, who have a variety of reasons for behaving as they do. All of them have virtues and faults, though I have to say that the reader has to search for the good in both Lee and Jenny, and REALLY search for the good in Lee’s father.
I was not a great fan of the constant shift in point of view / voice and time frame. This is a difficult technique to do well, and in this case, I felt it made the story more difficult to follow. And his lack of quotations, or italics, or some method of identifying when a character is thinking vs talking out loud also posed some problems. But those are really minor.
The message is visceral and disturbing and thought-provoking.
Boice chose to open the book with one of the most charged expletives in the English language – a crude word for female anatomy that begins with a ‘c’ – and he uses this word repeatedly over the next several pages. He has a specific purpose for this, and he drops it after a few pages, but it is still disturbing. I think some readers will be turned off and skip the book as a result. I know I nearly did.
The Shooting by James Boice is one of those books that overwhelms your every sense. With its focus firmly set on America's pervasive gun culture, The Shooting takes on what leads up to and the consequences of what happens when a young man is shot by a paranoid man with a guns.
Tightly written and almost uncomfortable to read at times, The Shooting forces readers to view the bruality and rawness of what makes Lee Fischer go from being a normal little boy longing for his father to come home to the wealthy, paranoid man with a gun in a penthouse who shoots the building superintendent's sleepwalking son.
Don't be put off by the rawness of the language, that is the beauty of The Shooting. Boice confronts the reader with bare bones honesty of his writing and his choice of subject.
It's not a feel-good novel. It's a novel that confronts the reality of America today--a country where you are more likely to be shot simply for being the wrong color than for committing a crime, a country where the Second Amendment's original intent has been bastardized. James Boice has an amazing writer's voice, but it will not speak to everyone. Prepare to be challenged as you read. This is not a book for people who want escapism, but it's a book which *should* be required reading for people sitting on both sides of the fence regarding gun control.
Wow this is one of the most insightful books about current American people are facing. Really went into this hoping for 3 stars but Boice had me at cunt. and ended with 4.5! The quote the resonated with me most is
"...you see a thousand faces a day yet know nothing about the people they belong to; there is an entire universe behind each one and so you must have faith in all people, you are forced to, the only other choice is to build walls around yourself and live afraid - what a fool is one who decides what is in another man's heart, what a vulgarian is one who ever presumes anything about anyone."
Gripped me from the shocking opening pages,The horror of what occurs the gun culture we live in portrayed in all its danger.A book you will not forget .
I rarely rate books five stars, but I can't think of one damned thing that I would change in this book. It's perfect. The only thing I didn't like about the book is that, eventually, it ended. ;)
I stumbled upon this book quite accidentally; I was looking for another book, and this book's title was just similar enough to the one I was searching for that I picked it up, too. And it ended up being my favorite novel of 2016, and one of my favorite books of all time!
The premise at first sounds simple - white guy, black kid, and a gun. As you can probably imagine, it doesn't end up great for the black kid, a fifteen year old African-American named Clayton. But the author goes so, so much deeper than that. You get into the heads of Lee Fisher, the shooter, who has a pretty messed up childhood of his own; Clayton Kabede, the child of immigrant parents who fled Africa fearful for their lives; and everyone the shooting affects, from Clayton's parents, to his girlfriend Stacey, to his friends, to just random people who were in contact with Clayton or Lee or the shooting in some way (the grief counselor, the reporter who doesn't get the scoop, the girl Lee liked in college, etc, etc).
There are many victims of gun culture in this book. And then there is Clayton, of course, who has a lengthy chapter of his own. It killed a piece of my soul to read about his origins (I won't spoil that) and to see things through his eyes, knowing for most of it that he is going to end up dead. I cried; I'm not going to pretend that I didn't. Then there is Jenny, who lost her own daughter, Michelle, in a horrific school shooting ten years prior. She's crusading around the country, trying to repeal the Second Amendment.
Be prepared to question things. Be prepared to have your heart torn to pieces. And be prepared to look at your own stances on gun control, or lack there of, and examine them. This book deserves to be a bestseller. People should be talking about this book. We need to have a discussion about the issues raised in this book; to call this novel "timely" is an understatement.