Summary
Summary
FORMER TEACHER HAD MOTIVE. Recently suspended for a so-called outburst, high school English teacher Anna Crawford is stewing over the injustice at home when she is shocked to see herself named on television as a suspect in a shooting at the school where she works. Though she is quickly exonerated, and the actual teenage murderer identified, her life is nevertheless held up for relentless scrutiny and judgment as this quiet town descends into media mania. Gun sales skyrocket, victims are transformed into martyrs, and the rules of public mourning are ruthlessly enforced. Anna decides to wholeheartedly reject the culpability she's somehow been assigned, and the rampant sexism that comes with it, both in person and online. A piercing feminist howl written in trenchant prose, How to Be Safe is a compulsively readable, darkly funny expose of the hypocrisy that ensues when illusions of peace are shattered.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
For a brief time in the relentless latest from McAllister (following The Young Widower's Handbook), suspended high school English teacher Anna Crawford is named a person of interest in the police investigation of a mass shooting at her school. Her first-person narrative picks up in the aftermath of the tragedy. Anna was suspended before the shooting for an unspecified outburst in the classroom. After the shooting, which ends when the unnamed male shooter kills himself, broadcast journalists show her picture and identify her as a suspect. In the chaos following the tragedy, she is bombarded with threatening phone calls, her home is searched by the FBI, and friends betray her. Even after the shooter is identified as a student and it is proven that he had no accomplices, the damage done to Anna proves hard for her to move past. McAllister's novel unfolds both as grim social commentary and a subtle exploration of the stages of grief. Anna, with some gallows humor, describes journalists swarming the young shooter's house and analyzing him ad nauseam, the way she becomes a target for well-wishers seeking to save her, and the constant churning arguments of both gun control opponents and proponents. Though Anna's voice is strong, the novel falters in its depiction of the tragedy's fallout, often electing to skim the surface instead of going deep. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A brilliant, tragically timely second novel from the author of The Young Widower's Handbook (2017).FORMER TEACHER HAD MOTIVE. When this chyron rolls across the bottom of a cable news segment, Anna Crawford becomes complicit in a high school shooting. Never mind that she had nothing to do with the crime; once she's part of the story, she's guilty of...something. This novel is an indictment of gun culture, hot-take journalism, and social media, and if that sounds like a miserable premise for a novel, fear not: McAllister is a brave and stylish writer, and Anna is a singular creation. At first, she seems like a classic unreliable narrator, but it quickly becomes hard to decide which is crazier: Anna or the world she's describing. As a one-time teacher and a thoroughgoing misfitshe was fired for being "unpredictable" just before the shootingAnna is perfectly positioned to understand the shooter even as she recognizes that both his teen angst and his deadly rage are hackneyed. Once she achieves secondhand fame, she notes that the strangers who want to kill her, those who want to rape her, and those who want to do bothin that ordershare the same fantasies of dominance. "In America," she says, "we send children to school to get shot and to learn algebra and physics and history and biology and literature. Less civilized nations don't have such an organized system for murdering their children. Mass murders in undeveloped countries occur because they are savages." Anna doesn't just worry about guns; she sees how misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and classism shape a society in which assault weapons are fetish objects. The horror is offsetor maybe thrown into sharp reliefby moments of mordant humor. When an evangelizing acquaintance tries to frighten Anna with images of darkness and demons and a final battle between good and evil, Anna says, "You might want to make this sound less excitingI kind of want to not repent just so I can see the whole scene." Then she adds, "People don't want to be bored."Intensely smart. Sharply written. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Dozens are dead or wounded after a high-school shooting in Seldom Falls, Pennsylvania, and suspended-teacher Anna Crawford is an early suspect. Anna, the narrator, grew up in the town, knew almost all of the victims, and heard the gunshots from her home. Now news outlets are camped on her lawn, her few friends are selling stories about her or reaching out in less-than-genuine ways, and it turns out her suspension was a permanent dismissal. The story, still somewhat vague, behind Anna's firing and pictures of her unhappy childhood and adult difficulties emerge, along with brief bios of the victims and Anna's (or maybe the author's) funny-and-not directions, as the title suggests, to staying safe in America today. Though Anna, who readers will empathize with and root for, drinks and behaves erratically, this is no new Girl novel. As for the massacre itself, focus stays on the victims, and violence occurs mainly off the page. Combining a deep character study, prescient satire, and an unfortunately all-too-timely evisceration of U.S. gun culture, McAllister's (The Young Widower's Handbook, 2017) well-voiced and remarkably observed page-turner is in almost all ways an anti-thriller itself a comment on the current, terrifying mundanity of similar events.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE SHOTS HAVE already been fired at the outset of Elise Juska's quietly clever novel "If We Had Known." The Chekhovían gun here is a personal essay that Nathan Dugan wrote for his freshman composition class at Central Maine State. What starts off as a mundane account of a father-son hunting trip gives way to a litany of weapons and their uses. Nathan's prose is drab and primitive, but nobody is as tone-deaf as his English professor, Maggie Daley, who is focused on her student's literary failings. In her comments, she points out crimes against paragraph structure and word choice, and slaps on a C+. She would rather save her critical energy for the work of more promising students. Four years later, Nathan packs a duffel bag with guns and ammunition and walks into a mall food court, where he shoots four people and himself, another iteration of a story with which we've become sickeningly familiar. Juska's novel was inspired by Lucinda Roy, the Virginia Tech creative writing professor who alerted school authorities about disturbing content in the work of her student Cho Seung-Hui. The school didn't do anything about Cho, who a year and a half later conducted a shooting rampage on campus, killing 32 people and wounding 17 others before taking his own life. Maggie doesn't have the luxury of past righteousness. When she hears the news of the shooting, she can only vaguely recall her former student until another student from Nathan's composition class writes a Facebook post stating his lack of surprise and recalling the "really weird" nature of Nathan's essay. The post goes viral, and Maggie's neighbors suddenly have an object for their anger in the professor who was asleep at the lectern. Maggie's supervisor informs her that his staff is now expected not only to teach but to function as something between a trained psychologist and the thought police, sniffing out evidence before there is any crime. "Any material that alludes, directly or indirectly, to feelings of sadness, anxiety, anger, violence, hopelessness," he tells Maggie, will warrant an official alert. But that's every student, every paper, Maggie reminds her boss. Moreover, the "personal experience" essays that are central to English composition classes depend on the mining of painful memories and vulnerabilities. Maggie doesn't thrive on intimacy, and doesn't thrill to her students' secrets and revelations. She is, however, a devoted and excellent teacher: "tough but affectionate, never breaking character, for 90 minutes focused on nothing but the lesson, on the welfare of the bright young people assembled before her." At a moment when people invite castigation for being chummy with their charges, it's refreshing to consider a teacher who is faulted for respecting boundaries. Juka, the author of several other novels, including "The Blessings" (2014), neatly lays the groundwork for a character who would be liable to miss flagrant warning signs. When Maggie's husband of 17 years left her for another woman, he accused Maggie of having been blind to his misery. Her teenage daughter, Anna, has a history of anxiety and disordered eating, and in the book's sections told from Anna's point of view, we learn that Maggie is only dimly aware of her daughter's continued struggles. Yet as the story moves through its many layers, Maggie's initial response to Nathan becomes problematic in a different way. As she tells her students, "Remember, fact and truth are two different things." Nathan's essay is disturbing - especially in hindsight - but where do you draw the line? Nearly all personal writing betrays an element of sadness, shyness or emptiness. And when living behind screens becomes the norm, aren't even the most successful and well adjusted among us a little bit awkward and isolated? In keeping with a novel about a writing instructor, Juska's prose is clean and straightforward. She strikes a cozy tone that is the literary opposite of toxic masculinity. In the opening pages, we learn that Maggie lives in a home with "high beamed ceilings, the soft pile of logs by the wood stove, the sun-bleached pillows piled in the window seat." We are also introduced to the loose-shingled red barn that "looks romantic from a distance," and serves as the repository for Maggie's students' old essays. The pace can drag, and no novel needs so many descriptions of the color and cast of the sky. But in our age of political rancor and tweet storms befitting our state of emergency, there is something radical about a take on the gun problem that concerns itself more with raising questions than ire. Darkness suffuses "How to Be Safe," Tom McAllister's heady and unsettling exploration of America's gun violence epidemic. A mass shooting hits the Rust Belt town of Seldom Falls, Pa., once a leading producer of elevator parts and now a pocket of the nation where opportunity has dried up and "guns were gifts you got for 13-year-old boys." The book's primary narrator is Anna Crawford, who was recently suspended from her job as a teacher at the school for her negative attitude and unstable behavior. When news of the shooting breaks, she is briefly considered a suspect, and neighbors and friends are all too willing to buy into the idea of Anna as villain. "Reports cited anonymous sources talking about everything I'd ever done wrong - shoplifting, taking too many smoke breaks at work, knocking over a neighbor's mailbox after an argument. An ex shared nude photos of me, because, he said, anyone who could kill kids had lost her right to privacy." Anna is quickly cleared of the crime, but people still avoid her. Even her online therapist blocks her. While those surrounding Anna go through the motions of healing, she does not grant herself forgiveness. She is steadfast in her sadness, perhaps the one thing she has claim to. Staggering about town, often half-drunk by midafternoon, she serves as a docent to tragedy and all that follows: the media swarms, the rallies, the memorials, the political infighting, the blip of a presidential visit, the hashtags. In a sadly Delphic feat, McAllister imagines a Friday morning student reflection program called "Never Again." Yet this is far more than a ripped-fromthe-headlines story. McAllister, the author of the melancholic novel "The Young Widower's Handbook" (2017), delivers here a portrait of a nation vibrating with failure and humiliation. Anna's history with abusive men long predates the shooting, which partly explains her willingness to serve as sponge for a fresh cycle of misogynistic vitriol. She contends with jeers and emailed threats, only to empathize with her abusers. One of the book's greatest successes is its exploration of the overlapping forces and impulses behind our nation's sexual-harassment and firearms crises. Anna visits a confession booth that has popped up on her town's main street. "I said I was lazy and unfocused and I understood why I was unlovable, but I still wished it weren't so. Then I said sometimes at night I think maybe I'm actually the one who did the shooting." McAllister is a writer of poetic inclinations, and his prose occasionally trips over itself with Werner Herzog-esque beats meant to impart resonance to a story that doesn't need it. In a section where Anna's ex-boyfriend Robbie makes her bacon and eggs, we learn: "Eggs are chickens that haven't been born yet. You eat them and then inside you they are born and your body is filled with birds." On the whole, though, the writing sears - and reminds us of literature's power to fill a void that no amount of inhaling the vapors of Twitter will satisfy. "What I envisioned was this: No memorial at all. No stone. No American flags every three feet. No ribbons. No priests and no Bible. No symbolic floral arrangements to represent vitality or youth or rebirth. No poet reading a poem about rising from the ashes. No obelisks, for God's sake. Just dig a huge hole and fill it with guns." Teachers are expected to function like something between a trained psychologist and the thought police. LAUREN MECHLING, a contributing editor at Vogue, has writtenfor The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker.com. She will publish her debut novel in 2019.
Library Journal Review
This darkly humorous primal scream of a novel takes as its subject the madness of modern American life, with all manner of violence, misogyny, paranoia, and self-righteousness on full, seedy display. At the center is a mass shooting at a public school, which leaves young high school English teacher Anna Crawford devastated. Already on what she considers an unjust suspension, Anna is further implicated in the tragedy, and she spends the entire novel trying to understand what happened and searching in vain for a way to be "safe." McAllister (The Young Widower's Handbook) suggests that this may not be possible, given the Internet trolls, vigilante busybodies, and future mass murderers hiding anonymously and angrily among us. Remarkably, the author is able to find some humor in the situation. VERDICT A blistering, Swiftian portrait of a nation that has lost its moral center, this book is a compelling from start to finish. Enthusiastically recommended for fans of literary fiction, psychological drama, and dystopian fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 10/16/17.]--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester -Community Coll., CT © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.