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A review by ridgewaygirl
How to Be Safe by Tom McAllister
5.0
How To Be Safe by Tom McAllister is told from the point of view of a high school English teacher, a woman who was not at the school the day the shooting happened. With the murderer dead, there's a search for possible accomplices and Anna is briefly investigated by the FBI and hounded by the media.
As time moves on, Anna looks around at how the shooting has changed the town for good, and how easily these school shootings, and all the mass shootings, are quickly moved past, a few more guns are sold, a monument commissioned, a few more cameras installed to keep watch. But Anna is not moving on. She is consumed with how to be safe, when there are so many dangers out there.
On the highway, you can run into more dangers than you've ever imagined. Not just distracted drivers but stalkers, sex traffickers, teens throwing rocks through windshields from the overpass. If you pass enough cars, you will have passed at least one murderer; that's just statistics.
This novel is narrated by Anna, who spends a lot of her time thinking about what is dangerous. Now out of a job, she spends her day not interacting with her former friends, or spending time with her brother, although she finds that no matter how badly she wants to stay safe, people keep intruding into her life, and she can't stop herself from going outside and interacting with the other people living in the dangerous world.
"The world is not out to get you."
"I never said it was." Though I thought: What if it is?
"Your paranoia makes you not even human. It just makes you this jagged shard of fear that can't do anything."
I turned off the TV and stood. If he wanted to do things, then we would do things. I put on a jacket and some shoes and told him to follow me. If we got killed, it would be on him.
How To Be Safe is very much a commentary on how we have chosen to live in the US today, and how that affects our communities. But despite the subject matter, this book isn't bleak; Anna is too full of fight for that, and McAllister writes with a detached humor that suits this novel very well.
As time moves on, Anna looks around at how the shooting has changed the town for good, and how easily these school shootings, and all the mass shootings, are quickly moved past, a few more guns are sold, a monument commissioned, a few more cameras installed to keep watch. But Anna is not moving on. She is consumed with how to be safe, when there are so many dangers out there.
On the highway, you can run into more dangers than you've ever imagined. Not just distracted drivers but stalkers, sex traffickers, teens throwing rocks through windshields from the overpass. If you pass enough cars, you will have passed at least one murderer; that's just statistics.
This novel is narrated by Anna, who spends a lot of her time thinking about what is dangerous. Now out of a job, she spends her day not interacting with her former friends, or spending time with her brother, although she finds that no matter how badly she wants to stay safe, people keep intruding into her life, and she can't stop herself from going outside and interacting with the other people living in the dangerous world.
"The world is not out to get you."
"I never said it was." Though I thought: What if it is?
"Your paranoia makes you not even human. It just makes you this jagged shard of fear that can't do anything."
I turned off the TV and stood. If he wanted to do things, then we would do things. I put on a jacket and some shoes and told him to follow me. If we got killed, it would be on him.
How To Be Safe is very much a commentary on how we have chosen to live in the US today, and how that affects our communities. But despite the subject matter, this book isn't bleak; Anna is too full of fight for that, and McAllister writes with a detached humor that suits this novel very well.