![]() Months later, in June 1948, the man, whose current alias was Frank La Salle, intercepted Sally on her walk home from school and convinced her that the government insisted she go with him to Atlantic City. As she was leaving the store, a "hawk-faced man" in a fedora grabbed her arm, told her he was an FBI agent and threatened her with reform school. Weinman is a thorough reporter who is most compelling when she tells it straight: Sally Horner, a fifth-grade honor student, stole a 5-cent notebook in her local Camden, N.J., Woolworths on a dare by a clique of girls she hoped to join. ![]() Her book makes for riveting reading, despite a disconcerting tendency to fill in blanks with conjectures (about young Sally's thoughts, for example) and to overplay cliffhangers at the end of each chapter. ![]() She does it not just for its own inherent interest but in order to build a convincing case that that crime served as an inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov's most famous novel, Lolita - a claim that he denied. Sarah Weinman, an editor and writer of true crime stories, doubles up on her literary sleuthing in The Real Lolita, investigating the 1948 kidnapping and rape of 11-year-old Sally Horner by a convicted pedophile. ![]() ![]() Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Real Lolita Subtitle The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World Author Sarah Weinman ![]()
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