How to Be Safe by Tom McAllister
Pages: 240 Genre: Fiction
Published: April 3rd, 2018 by Liveright
My Rating: 3.5 Stars ⭐⭐⭐ Drink of choice: Harney & Sons Pumpkin Tea- 4 Stars⭐⭐⭐⭐
I feel like book reviews need to be more interesting, or maybe it is just mine(😂) I’m not sure if rating my drink of choice(ya know the drink I was drinking while reading) will make it more of a better review but I got to try something different. So anyway, I discovered Harney & Sons Tea about a month ago and the Pumpkin Spice tea is 100% delicious! It doesn’t have to pumpkin overload aftertaste like everything else.
But anyways back to the book review.
“With some time to kill, the shooter parks his car outside One Brother’s Pizza, and he thinks: Its just a slice, a slice won’t slow me down.”
This book starts out with what the student does before he goes to shoot up his high school. It states that he’s been planning this for months. When it first starts, I thought this book was going to be about the shooter, his thoughts, the thoughts of the students as its happening and the aftermath of the shooting.
“He wants them to understand the randomness of fate, to understand that he himself is fate personified, and he chose not to kill them, not because they’re special or more important or better prepared or more faithful or more likable, but because there is no reason but unreason.“
But after the Prologue, I quickly realize the story was being told by Anna, she was a former teacher at the high school who recently got suspended because of her behavior. She hears the gunshots from her home and is later arrested because she is a prime suspect. After she was suspended, she posted angry messages about the school things like “I should’ve burned down the building” etc. I really liked this book at the beginning. I had soo many quotes that I wanted to write down and that is something that I don’t do very often. However, as it kept going I sadly found myself getting bored with the story 🙁 -I feel so bad saying that- I managed to finish the whole book and while I started to become less interested in it I don’t regret reading it. It was a darkly funny exposer of how one crime can have a snowball effect. I say darkly funny because there were moments when I wasn’t sure how to take Anna. One minute she is serious and the next she is seeing the ghost walking around the school hallways.
This book describes many problems that this country has faced lately. Gun control, mass shootings, mental illness, etc.
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