School shooting. Suicide

2.5 Stars ( )

A word of warning…the book is disturbing on so many different levels. The reader has a hard time thinking of it as fiction since the scene has been repeated so many times in so many different cities and schools with the same tragic and heartbreaking results. To tell the story of two alienated and disaffected teenagers who become obsessed with guns and bombs and ultimately vow to exact revenge on all the students…faculty members…and administrators at their school…the author employees many voices to reflect the incomplete narrative that inevitably emerges from tragedies such as these Parts of the narrative go into “preachy” homilies about bullying and tolerance vs. intolerance, but it’s hard to object when there are no easy solutions available. An unexpected and ironic development at the end of the violence highlights the complexity of the issue, and no one escapes a part of the blame. The author rightly acknowledges that we are all culpable to some extant…as we sometimes come across as a culture that values violence over empathy. ( )

I didn't exactly love or like this book. But I didn't hate it either. Honestly, I think it was the format which it was written in. It was written from multiple other perspectives, instead of what I expected, which was from the main characters' perspectives. The only main character perspective we get is from a letter written by Brendan, the number one main character. I think I just wanted more of a perspective from him and maybe more of a back story as to what was the big reason as to why it happened the way it happened.
P.S. Sorry I'm talking like this I just don't want to give away spoilers to people who do want to read the book. ( )

Definitely consider your sensitivities before reading this one as it is challenging subject matter.

Fictional witness accounts of two teenagers who plan an attack on their school intermix with non-fiction gun violence statistics and snippets from shooting cases. It’s a harrowing combination of fact and fiction, sad and frustrating, so yeah, not a particularly enjoyable read, but thoughtfully done.

The format works really well in that it covers several angles of the story and gives voice to many points of view. You get a sense of who these two fictional boys were and possible contributing factors to their warped thought processes, they’re humanized to a degree though the narrative does not condone or justify their actions. Some of the victims, the ones who were originally the bullies, don’t come off quite as dimensional as they maybe could have, though I don’t know, perhaps that’s part of the point, if there’s a refusal to acknowledge that something needs to change, things won’t change. ( )

As part of a collection of books I'm reading for a book-talk I'll be doing later this year, I read this book. It was an interesting format, I thought: snippets of interviews from various people (on both "sides") after a school shooting. This particular book is a work of fiction geared for youth, maybe grades 5-8 or higher.... While the author does comment that it's difficult, writing such a book for youth, he also admits that the need for such a book has arisen, after all the incidents that have occurred in recent years. (And this book was written back in the year 2000.) He concedes that it's sad to have to think that our children will need to be reading this sort of subject matter, that they'll need to be prepared for what to do in an active shooter situation.

One thing I often found disturbing about this book, simply because it interrupted the flow of the story a bit, was that at the bottom of nearly every page, there were quotes from newspapers following other school shootings, there were facts regarding the amount of gun sales, there were bits from interviews with gun manufacturers, etc. They were from real-life, where the actual story was clearly fiction. It probably couldn't have been done any other way--I just found it to interfere with my reading at times. However, I also appreciated that those little factoids were available, as I hadn't known many of them prior to reading this. Some of the information that is out there for any of us to access, if we'll only do so, is jaw-dropping!

I have to mention, I really appreciated the clarity of the point of view of the shooters. Obviously, they were never actually interviewed, because they'd both shot themselves. However, they'd both left suicide notes, and they'd both had close enough friends who knew their stance on certain views. What I found especially interesting was that much of what the shooters felt were the same things I had felt when I was in school--I still feel those things today, as a parent. Clearly, I never took a gun to school and shot people because of those feelings. My point is that the way these kids were treated and made to feel... those are NOT even remotely uncommon. People are treated this way every day in every town and city, and they are made to feel *less than* every single day. And it hurts. And it sucks. And I still get angry and heartbroken when I think about it. And I don't see an end in sight.... ( )