Music of the swamp

Lewis Nordan's fiction invents its own world -- always populated by madly heroic misfits. In Music of the Swamp, he focuses his magic and imagination on a boy's utterly helpless love for his utterly hopeless father -- a man who attracts bad luck like a magnet. Nordan evokes ten-year-old Sugar Mecklin's world with dazzling clarity: the smells, the tastes, and most surely the sounds of life in this peculiar, somewhat bizarre, Delta town. Sugar discovers that what his daddy says is true: "The Delta is filled up with death"; but he also finds an endless supply of hope.