Thoughts & Prayers

November 6, 2020

GR 9 Up-A year after a school shooting, three teens share their stories. Claire fled Hickory, NC with her brother for Minnesota, where she starts at a new school and tries to find her way back to normalcy through new friends picked up at the skate park. When hints of mental illness start to surface in one of her new friends, Claire, angry that no one picked up the warning signs at her old school, panics and then learns to forgive. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Eleanor (Claire's former best friend) wore a homemade anti-gun T-shirt to school. Not an intentional activist, she garnered a loyal following nonetheless as well as unwanted attention from gun-toting right-wingers. When threats escalate just as she's trying to withdraw from the spotlight and focus on basketball, she must decide how to find her voice but keep her sanity. Finally, readers meet Brezzen as he finds the strength to start back at school after a long time home, immersed in the world of Wizards and Warriors, a Dungeons and Dragons-esque role-playing game that serves both as a pastime and a metaphor for fighting the demons of the shooting. This novel is never gratuitous. The shooting itself is barely referenced and the shooter, appropriately, not at all. Though showing signs of light, the characters' recovery is far from over by the book's end, which rings authentically untidy. Characters' appearances and backgrounds are largely not described. VERDICT Each story is a separate meditation on the ways a horrific event can turn a life upside down.-Jill Heritage Maza, Montclair Kimberley Academy, NJ

Copyright 2020 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2020
Three high school students cope with the aftermath of a school shooting. About one year ago, three students cowered together under a staircase during a mass shooting in their school. Now, each one is attempting to move on with life in their own way. Claire has fled to another state and tried to forget, Eleanor rages against the establishment, and Brezzen has retreated into the escapist fantasy of a Dungeons and Dragons-like game. This book shines in certain areas while stumbling in others. The characters are real and likable, and their trauma is honest and raw. Bliss raises unanswerable questions that will allow teenage readers room to reflect and debate. He offers no trite solutions yet does not feign political neutrality. An element of the story having to do with zero-tolerance rhetoric that promotes criminalizing and expelling troubled kids instead of helping them may not be sufficiently contextualized for some readers. And though the characters and their trauma feel real, the depictions of their respective subcultures of skateboarding, basketball, and tabletop role-playing have the distinct flavor of an adult trying too hard to be hip. Ultimately, the book may leave some readers wanting a stronger thesis or at least a conclusive end to the kids' stories. But as in trauma and life, sometimes there is no neat ending. Characters default to White. An affecting story of trauma and healing. (Fiction. 14-18)

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 4, 2020
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* What happens to survivors of a school shooting? It's a vexing question and one that Bliss seeks to answer in this richly realized novel, which is divided into three parts, each focusing on a different survivor of the same shooting. In Part 1, it's Claire, who was so deeply traumatized by the experience that she and her older brother have moved from their small North Carolina town to Minnesota, hoping to leave the trauma behind only to discover that it has come with them. In Part 2, it's Eleanor, who has worn a hand-lettered shirt to school that says "Fuck Guns," an act that has attracted national attention and made her a pariah in her gun-crazy town. And in Part 3, it's Brendan, who has fearfully returned to school after a year's absence during which time he has obsessively played Wizards and Warriors with his therapist, a game that has taken over his life. The considerable length of this book--each part is nearly long enough to have been published as a standalone novel--affords Bliss more than ample room for plot and character development, at both of which he excels. The theme, of course, is a powerful one, and it is passionately and successfully presented in this inarguably important book, which offers no glib answers but invites serious thought and discussion.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2021
"When was the last time she'd actually felt safe? She knew the exact minute of the exact day." Claire didn't die in the North Carolina school shooting that took the lives of three fellow students and a teacher, but she is a victim nevertheless, and so are Eleanor and Brezzen, whose lives are intertwined with Claire's, in Bliss's affecting narrative triptych. Claire's troubled existence at her new school in Minnesota is plotted out with precision, as she must decide "which routes to take in the hallway, which teachers would understand when she needed to just put her head down," and how to keep "monstrous" thoughts at bay. Where Claire is troubled, Eleanor is angry, her rage-infused first-person voice represented by the iconoclastic FUCK GUNS T-shirt she made after the incident. Her fury is directed at teachers, coaches, school board members, the whole town in North Carolina, where "it has been an entire year and nobody has done a damn thing." Brezzen has retreated into his fantasy-game world of Wizards & Warriors, with its Game Masters, dragons, and skeleton hordes. In each memorable narrative thread, characters are distinct and carefully drawn, though the author's hand is at times evident in language too adult-sounding ("It must be difficult to be a creation...To lose all sorts of...I don't know. Agency, maybe. Control?") and in advice offered by helpful teachers. But the three stories do yield "an honest picture of healing after trauma," as the author hopes for in his acknowledgments.

(Copyright 2021 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

January 1, 2021
"When was the last time she'd actually felt safe? She knew the exact minute of the exact day." Claire didn't die in the North Carolina school shooting that took the lives of three fellow students and a teacher, but she is a victim nevertheless, and so are Eleanor and Brezzen, whose lives are intertwined with Claire's, in Bliss's affecting narrative triptych. Claire's troubled existence at her new school in Minnesota is plotted out with precision, as she must decide "which routes to take in the hallway, which teachers would understand when she needed to just put her head down," and how to keep "monstrous" thoughts at bay. Where Claire is troubled, Eleanor is angry, her rage-infused first-person voice represented by the iconoclastic FUCK GUNS T-shirt she made after the incident. Her fury is directed at teachers, coaches, school board members, the whole town in North Carolina, where "it has been an entire year and nobody has done a damn thing." Brezzen has retreated into his fantasy-game world of Wizards & Warriors, with its Game Masters, dragons, and skeleton hordes. In each memorable narrative thread, characters are distinct and carefully drawn, though the author's hand is at times evident in language too adult-sounding ("It must be difficult to be a creation...To lose all sorts of...I don't know. Agency, maybe. Control?") and in advice offered by helpful teachers. But the three stories do yield "an honest picture of healing after trauma," as the author hopes for in his acknowledgments. Dean Schneider

(Copyright 2021 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)