10:00 a.m.
The principal of Opportunity, Alabama’s high school finishes her speech, welcoming the entire student body to a new semester and encouraging them to excel and achieve.10:02 a.m.
The students get up to leave the auditorium for their next class.10:03
The auditorium doors won’t open.10:05
Someone starts shooting.Told over the span of 54 harrowing minutes from four different perspectives, terror reigns as one student’s calculated revenge turns into the ultimate game of survival. – Goodreads
First off — I’ve disappeared off of the face of the Earth. I’m working on it. There are some things going on my personal life that have forced me to make the blog/reading take a backseat (especially when paired with a reading slump). I finished this book a while ago but am finally getting around to the review.
The book was shocking to say the least. After all, I’ve read Columbine, I’ve read the news stories — this was a first-hand fictional look. It was bloody and violent.
Though the entire book spans 54 minutes, it’s fast-paced in parts and slow in others. The writing was alright. I had a difficult time keeping track of the characters and understanding their relationships to one another. I did like that they all had very different backgrounds. That being said, I never felt attached to any of them.
The shooter made me angry — his character was very one-dimensional. I felt that there was a lot of that could have been done with him, but it was lazy and just…fell flat.
There was so much potential here and it fell flat. This book talks about very real problems — rape, racism, abuse, school shootings, etc. — yet never manages to actual touch on the emotion.
I rated it a 2/5.
lifebetweenreads.com 