A beautiful little incendiary of a book that lobs itself straight into the brain, and burns. Suspended high school teacher Anna Crawford’s life is never quite the same after she is falsely accused of involvement in a high school shooting. But then her life before wasn’t great either. The commentary that erupts unedited from her depressive, anxiety-addled, sad, sad brain is spot on. Of the teenage shooter in the school shooting she says;
”[he] had a name and a face and a past….what they did not talk about was that the shooter was a boy. He was a boy in a world in which boys play by pretending to kill other boys, he was a boy with access to military-grade firepower but not to an adult support system or psychiatric services.”
Anna is good company: utterly bleak and frequently hilarious. As she points out of a carpenter building a bunker for a Christian survivalist cult: “to be a carpenter for a Christian Church is a significant burden, considering the lineage.” The darkness of her mind gives her a clear, cold insight into the hypocrisy of America’s stance on gun ownership, violence, toxic masculinity and misogyny. The fact that this searing book was written by a man, and a white American man at that, gives me hope.
