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seemeghanread 's review for:
Shooter
by Caroline Pignat
POPSUGAR 2018 READING CHALLENGE: A book by a local author
Caroline Kepnes grew up in my hometown and still lives there and works as a teacher. So it was pretty great to read a book that so obviously takes place in a high school in that city. Some of the characters are in a course called "Writer's Craft", and I took that course in high school, myself. The characters are talking about getting accepted to different university programs, and they're all Canadian universities. One character even got rejected from the university I attend. So the local factor won this book some points in my book.
I did enjoy this, but I think it's inaccurate to say that this book is about a school shooting. Instead, the shooter and the lockdown act as the mechanisms to get these five characters in a bathroom together, who would otherwise likely never all be in the same room. So it's a bit a bit of a character study in that sense. And it worked. The characters were all very interesting in their own ways. We get narration from all of them, as well as some text messages and class assignments and the like. One criticism I have is that the narrative voices were not very distinct. It was easy to forget who was narrating a given chapter. Still, it was interesting to learn a little bit more of each of the characters as the story went on, and there was even a sweet little romance that started to blossom.
One final complaint is that I think this story could have gone deeper, especially when it came to the shooter. His motivations were never super clear to me. And given the fact that school shootings are so common (particularly in the United States), I think the author could have portrayed the shooter more accurately, instead of as a boy who idolizes supervillains and committed increasingly escalating pranks until a shooting was the next logical step.
So if you read this book, read it for the 5 main characters, their back stories, and their interactions.
Caroline Kepnes grew up in my hometown and still lives there and works as a teacher. So it was pretty great to read a book that so obviously takes place in a high school in that city. Some of the characters are in a course called "Writer's Craft", and I took that course in high school, myself. The characters are talking about getting accepted to different university programs, and they're all Canadian universities. One character even got rejected from the university I attend. So the local factor won this book some points in my book.
I did enjoy this, but I think it's inaccurate to say that this book is about a school shooting. Instead, the shooter and the lockdown act as the mechanisms to get these five characters in a bathroom together, who would otherwise likely never all be in the same room. So it's a bit a bit of a character study in that sense. And it worked. The characters were all very interesting in their own ways. We get narration from all of them, as well as some text messages and class assignments and the like. One criticism I have is that the narrative voices were not very distinct. It was easy to forget who was narrating a given chapter. Still, it was interesting to learn a little bit more of each of the characters as the story went on, and there was even a sweet little romance that started to blossom.
One final complaint is that I think this story could have gone deeper, especially when it came to the shooter. His motivations were never super clear to me. And given the fact that school shootings are so common (particularly in the United States), I think the author could have portrayed the shooter more accurately, instead of as a boy who idolizes supervillains and committed increasingly escalating pranks until a shooting was the next logical step.
So if you read this book, read it for the 5 main characters, their back stories, and their interactions.