Shooter by Walter Dean Myers

Before I begin I want to say that this book is definatly for the older grades and the advanced readers. I bet that was a given due to the title. Anyways this book is about the aftermath of a school shooting. What is AMAZING about this book is how it is written. You first are reading manuscripts of 2 interviews from the shooters 2 best friends Cameron and Carla. They seem to beat him down with questions about the incident as they call it. After reading the interviews, you see newspaper clippings from the papers about the shooting, then the police report, and finally the shooters diary. It is a great way to see the shooting in depth from 3 point of views. We are not used to seeing that in the media. We don't get to see the interrogations of the friends and familiy. We never see the personal diaries of the shooter so it is like an inside look at what a killer might be like.

The very look of the book is so cool too. There is police tape across the front of the cover which is what drew me to pick this one off the shelf. The top os the pages that normally have the book title and chapter names are made to look like stamps of the police files from the county. The cover has a bullet hole and so does that back. It looks like on one side it could be a person and on the other side a wall.

This book WILl keep you in suspense. I couldn't put it down once I first started reading it. You don't even know what happened at the school shooting until much later because in the interviews you are learning about the shooter (Len), Carla, and Camerson. That is what kept me going. I wanted to know what happened. It is almost like working backwards from the things we see in the media. First we are presented with the evidence and the facts and then we learn about what happens. This made it cool because you get to formulate your own opinions about what happened, who is to blame, and if you could have seen it coming. From what I have seen about school shooting there may seem to be a "category" that people fit into. I am not trying to sterotyoe here I am just pointing out similarities. First, they are kids who are bullied everyday so much so that they would rather end their own life then walk through the halls of their schools again. Secondly, there seems to be a lack of solid relationships in their lives from friends to family. Both of those are seem here in the book.

I would reccomend that this book be read even if you just have some free time. It obviously will be a very easy read for us older people but still is engrossing.