LOLITA, WE HARDLY KNEW YE..... THE NYMPHET......IN FACT & FICTION

               Until we stumbled upon both these books, reading them back to back.......we'd no idea that Vladimir Nabakov's legendary, famous novel "Lolita" was partially inspired by a true story.....and yes, an actual real life child.

                 The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping Of Sally Horner And The Novel That Scandalized The World by Sarah Weinman (2018)    Weinman, a true crime author, takes on an extra heavy investigative agenda here......

                   She exhaustively researches and details the short tragic life of Sally Horner, a Camden New Jersey 11 year old abducted in 1949 by Frank La Salle, a monstrous serial pedophile rapist.

                     With Sally as his captive sex slave, La Salle embarked on a cross country road trip that finally ended two years later in a California trailer park........when Sally finally revealed the truth of her captivity to a neighbor, who alerted the cops and the FBI.

                    Returned to her mother, her childhood essentially stolen and destroyed by La Salle, Sally Horner only lived another two years......dying at 15 in a traffic accident.

                    In addition to the fascinating factual nuggets she digs up, Weinman draws the unmistakable parallels between Sally Horner's heart-crushing story and Nabakov's ongoing struggles to complete his novel about a young girl victimized by a pedophile.

                    The timelines between the creation of "Lolita" and the Horner crime do collide and Weinman convincingly makes her case that Nabakov most certainly read about Sally and drew some inspiration from the accounts of her ordeal.

                     The crime reporting can't help but be riveting, while the Nabakov chapters tend to suffer from dry academia.....(except for the sections on "Lolita"s up-and-down road to publication and Nabakov's attempts to adapt it to a screenplay for Stanley Kubrick.)   With its side by side tales of truth and fiction,  "The Real Lolita" never failed to grip our attention.....3 stars (***)

                     For a richly imagined fictional version of Sally Horner's story, there's Rust & Stardust by T. Greenwood (2018)   With only the sketchiest information available on the details of Frank La Salle's cross country trek with Sally, Greenwood envisions a likely, realistic account of the horrible odyssey......(La Salle began by convincing the child he was an FBI agent who'd caught her red-handed stealing a notebook from a a five and dime store....)

                       Greenwood creates some sympathetic fictional characters that Sally meets along the tortuous trip, as well as adding depth and emotion to the much bedeviled figure of Sally's mother Ella......(brutally criticized for allowing La Salle to easily trick her into thinking he was the father of one of Sally's schoolmates, taking Sally along on a family seashore vacation)

                        Even with all the softened, romanticized edges and artistic license, "Rust & Stardust" gives Sally Horner and her doomed life a worthy re-telling.......with the heartbreak, cruelty, suspense and horror intact........(and sadly, a story that never stops resonating in today's headlines)   4 stars (****)