CW: Reference to school shooting and suicide of shooters (off page). ( )

Prose’s propulsive young adult novel, written a few years after Columbine and shortly after 911, presents us with a world in which the controversial control and surveillance issues that arose out of those events have been pushed even further. The book is engagingly narrated in the first person by Tom Bishop, a smart-talking student who attends Central High, a small secondary school in rural Massachusetts. As the story opens, a mass shooting has just occurred at Pleasant Valley High, a school fifty miles from Central. This is too close for comfort for school authorities, though Tom and his friends—Brian, Silas, and Avery—think that the proximity of the recent massacre actually decreases the chance that their school will experience something similar.

Central High brings in a sinister grief and crisis counsellor, Dr. Willner, who introduces “protective” measures to prevent a mass shooting from occurring there. Metal detectors are installed at all entrances; guards are hired to go through students’ gym bags and backpacks; there is a Zero Tolerance policy for weapons and substance abuse, and since the Pleasant Valley High killers wore red clothing and trench coats, both are forbidden at Central. When a much admired girl continues to wear a red ribbon in memory of her brother who died of AIDS, she disappears. Because she has not complied with a rule, she’s sent to an “Operation Turnaround” facility for troubled youth. These places had a bad rap even before the Pleasant Valley mass shooting—bad enough for TV news magazine 60 Minutes to report on them. God knows what’s going on at them now.

Nightly emails are sent out to inform parents of the school’s seemingly endless new rules and initiatives for keeping kids safe, and adults are supportive of the measures. What could be wrong with being proactive about protecting young people? Parents and teachers fall in line, using the new therapeutic jargon that peppers the messages from the school. There’s an abundance of psychobabble about “working through our fear and grief” and “the hard work of healing and recovery.” The film Invasion of the Body Snatchers is frequently invoked by Tom and his friends; they observe that adults have become “pod people,” incapable of independent thought, brainwashed and robotic.

In the earliest messages from the school, parents are exhorted to monitor their kids for signs of distress. Later they’re urged remind sons and daughters to report suspicious behaviour—anything that might suggest doubt about the narrative that’s being fed to them. Cell phones are banned in school; so are certain books. A social studies teacher who once encouraged regular open class discussion goes on an emergency health leave, and the unassuming school principal, sidelined by the malevolent Dr. Willner, takes early retirement. Alarmingly, Tom’s friend Silas is sent off to a wilderness rehab camp in the Arizona desert, ostensibly to manage his problem with marijuana, detected during a random urinalysis in gym class. While under a form of house arrest before he leaves, Silas tells his visiting friends to go to the library to look up Stalin. Tom does, only to discover books on the dictator have been removed. It turns out that Silas’s paranoia, always attributed to his overuse of pot, has some foundation in reality. As the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

The story briefly turns into one of student resistance, but then . . . it just peters out. There are suggestions that what’s happening at Tom’s school is occurring at others and that the terrifying Dr. Willner is only a cog in a larger machine. As a reader, I expected to find an announcement for a sequel, an AfterAfter if you will. The conclusion certainly leaves you dangling.

Fear is a great controlling device. If you make people scared enough, you can get them to give up a lot on the pretext that their sacrifices are for their own and others’ good. Privacy and freedom—of speech, movement, association, and even thought—are compromised. Language is managed. Stilted psychological and ideological jargon creeps into everyday speech until everyone starts to sound the same as everybody else, or tries to, for fear of what will happen if they don’t. What begins as seeming concern for the common good morphs into oppression. In spite of its unsatisfying conclusion, Prose’s quick-paced and readable novel raises thought-provoking questions about matters of freedom and social control, the good of the group versus the rights and autonomy of the individual. Given our last two years, when some scientific voices have been de-platformed or silenced for challenging the dominant narrative about a virus, it’s not hard to argue that novels like this one are more relevant than ever. ( )

Rather unsettling ( )

A very interesting up to date story of school gone bad... But be careful of the open ended lack of closure... ( )

This book takes a look at a school after a shooting occurred at a high school in a nearby town, and focuses on the changes that are instituted by the school administrators in name of security.

The story is told from the point of view of a teenager, Tom, who witnesses steadily increasing paranoia causing rapidly diminishing privileges and escalating punishment, which started after a new "grief counselor" is hired by the school.

Dress codes, backpack searches and random drug tests soon expand into mind-controlling daily assemblies, book censorship, and camps for "behavior" problems.

The book gets a little strange about mid-way through, and reminded me a little of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", particularly with the way some of the parents completely check-out and let the school run their family's lives, but overall, it is a good book.

( )