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A review by trayceebee
Give A Boy A Gun by Todd Strasser
4.0
As part of a collection of books I'm reading for a book-talk I'll be doing later this year, I read this book. It was an interesting format, I thought: snippets of interviews from various people (on both "sides") after a school shooting. This particular book is a work of fiction geared for youth, maybe grades 5-8 or higher.... While the author does comment that it's difficult, writing such a book for youth, he also admits that the need for such a book has arisen, after all the incidents that have occurred in recent years. (And this book was written back in the year 2000.) He concedes that it's sad to have to think that our children will need to be reading this sort of subject matter, that they'll need to be prepared for what to do in an active shooter situation.
One thing I often found disturbing about this book, simply because it interrupted the flow of the story a bit, was that at the bottom of nearly every page, there were quotes from newspapers following other school shootings, there were facts regarding the amount of gun sales, there were bits from interviews with gun manufacturers, etc. They were from real-life, where the actual story was clearly fiction. It probably couldn't have been done any other way--I just found it to interfere with my reading at times. However, I also appreciated that those little factoids were available, as I hadn't known many of them prior to reading this. Some of the information that is out there for any of us to access, if we'll only do so, is jaw-dropping!
I have to mention, I really appreciated the clarity of the point of view of the shooters. Obviously, they were never actually interviewed, because they'd both shot themselves. However, they'd both left suicide notes, and they'd both had close enough friends who knew their stance on certain views. What I found especially interesting was that much of what the shooters felt were the same things I had felt when I was in school--I still feel those things today, as a parent. Clearly, I never took a gun to school and shot people because of those feelings. My point is that the way these kids were treated and made to feel... those are NOT even remotely uncommon. People are treated this way every day in every town and city, and they are made to feel *less than* every single day. And it hurts. And it sucks. And I still get angry and heartbroken when I think about it. And I don't see an end in sight....
One thing I often found disturbing about this book, simply because it interrupted the flow of the story a bit, was that at the bottom of nearly every page, there were quotes from newspapers following other school shootings, there were facts regarding the amount of gun sales, there were bits from interviews with gun manufacturers, etc. They were from real-life, where the actual story was clearly fiction. It probably couldn't have been done any other way--I just found it to interfere with my reading at times. However, I also appreciated that those little factoids were available, as I hadn't known many of them prior to reading this. Some of the information that is out there for any of us to access, if we'll only do so, is jaw-dropping!
I have to mention, I really appreciated the clarity of the point of view of the shooters. Obviously, they were never actually interviewed, because they'd both shot themselves. However, they'd both left suicide notes, and they'd both had close enough friends who knew their stance on certain views. What I found especially interesting was that much of what the shooters felt were the same things I had felt when I was in school--I still feel those things today, as a parent. Clearly, I never took a gun to school and shot people because of those feelings. My point is that the way these kids were treated and made to feel... those are NOT even remotely uncommon. People are treated this way every day in every town and city, and they are made to feel *less than* every single day. And it hurts. And it sucks. And I still get angry and heartbroken when I think about it. And I don't see an end in sight....