"Nothing links person to person like the frequent passage from hand to hand of a good book."

I've had this book on my shelf for a long time. I picked it up originally at my local Friends of the Library store in Rancho Penasquitos.

This story is heart-breaking. The story of a high school shooting and the lives of the individual kids involved is engrossing and thought-provoking. As with many of Jodi Picoult's books, I wanted to slap a couple of people really badly, and I also found a few of the premises simplistic. But in reality, parents do often (IMO, mistakenly) believe that their children have a right to privacy, thereby missing so many danger signs. A parent's job (again, my opinion) is to love, teach, grow and launch children into people of integrity who can become good citizens of the world. Neglecting to actively supervise them is just stupid and a dereliction of duty. A child can be of harm only to themselves (as in Joey's case) and still the parents need to know. The parents that really drove me crazy were, of course, Peter's parents. None of what happened was directly their fault, but frequent meetings at school, starting in elementary school, should have given them a better picture of their son's experiences so that they could do something proactive. That boy, at a different school or home schooled, would have had an entirely different childhood and adulthood. Can you tell that this really makes me nuts??? Don't even get me started on the fact that the dad had guns in a locked cabinet but everyone knew the location of the key. Of course the school principal and teachers are greatly to blame, having witnessed much of this bullying, and the students who did the bullying are very much to blame, but how no one saw the extent of the bullying and spoke up or did anything is beyond me. I don't at all condone the massacre as a justified result of the bullying, but I can really almost viscerally feel what Peter felt and understand how he chose to do what he did. The challenge in this country is to stop bullying before the fact, before the massacre, before a child becomes a habitual bully, before a victim of bullying becomes a person of no self esteem, before an entire generation of kids grows up thinking that bullying is part of the natural order.

The entire story is so sad, and yet, while a bit manipulating by the author's use of simplistic premises, so very plausible. I'm still thinking about it because it was truly frightening.

Set free at a book discussion group for another reader to enjoy.

You have in your hands a gift. This book is yours to do with as you wish...read it, share it, keep it, pass it on. Thanks for finding this book! I hope you enjoy reading it. Please leave a journal entry and let me know where this book has traveled! It can be done anonymously if you wish :)