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A Wreath for Emmett Till Marilyn Nelson, illustrated by Philippe Lardy Boston: Houghton, 2005. 42 pp. $17.00. Grades 8 and up. ISBN 0-618-39752-3 (trade).
The construction of the text in this book was an admirable feat. Marilyn Nelson, an English professor at the University of Connecticut, took an affecting and powerful subject, the 1955 racially motivated murder of Emmett Till, a gentle teenage boy from Chicago visiting family in Mississippi, and illuminated it through a rare literary form, the heroic crown of sonnets: "A crown of sonnets is a sequence of interlinked sonnets in which the last line of one becomes the first line, sometimes slightly altered, of the next. A heroic crown of sonnets is a sequence of fifteen interlinked sonnets, in which the last one is made up of the first lines of...