Shooter

At first I thought it was just copying Breakfast club. But it’s so current and you really get in the heads of all these kids. I only wish we could have gotten in Max’s head. Great book!

Much more about the lives of five very different high school students than a school shooting. A modern day Breakfast Club, complete with the princess, the nerd, the weirdo, and the jock. Most of these people don't spent any time together or even notice each other at all. Locked in a room with no way out, is it possible that they could gain some kind of understanding about each other?Alice is the shy and nerdy writer. She spends a lot of time worrying after her autistic brother, Noah. When everything is going right, he's fine. When things change, he can be unpredictable. Locked in a bathroom with strangers is not the ideal situation for anyone, and for him it's much worse. Isabelle is the stuck-up and spoiled school president. She has issues of her own, but it's hard to see past her ego-mania. Hogan is the huge ex-football player with a troubled past who radiates hostility and anger. Xander is a socially awkward photographer who has a really hard time understanding other people. These are not people that would hang out together... but now they have nowhere else to go.They know their school is on lockdown. They know there's rumors of a shooter roaming the hallways. They know that there is a police presence in the school. What they don't know is who to watch out for... and how they're ever going to leave the school.Read and enjoyed in one sitting. I'd recommend it to readers who like YA novels. There's bound to be a character here you relate to in some way, and the story is very intriguing.I received a copy of this book from Net Galley and Penguin Random House Canada, thank you! My review is honest and unbiased.

If you can imagine, The Breakfast Club with a gunman running around the school, you will get this book. A few school kids, from different social standings, trapped in a bathroom. There are a few twists that keep you on the edge of your seat. It was a very fast read. I enjoyed the story line and all the characters, even though I must say I really felt bad for Alice and her responsibilities being so young and having to help take care of her brother. I would recommend this to everyone.

I recently heard about this book when the author made an appearance on a local TV show (Our Ottawa). I'm so glad I did! The book is gripping from cover to cover, as Pignat weaves her story of five very different high school students stuck in a boy's bathroom during what turns out to be a frighteningly real lockdown. I especially loved the wonderful care the author took in her character development, beginning with the typical superficial "posturing" and quick, dismissive and/or suspicious views they each have of each other, then carefully revealing and building on the invisible secrets and gifts hiding within each person's real story. By the end of the book, each character became so real to me that I genuinely cared what happened to them. When I had to put the book down to do more menial things like housework and meal preparation, the story kept calling to me and I found myself worried for these kids, wondering what was happening next...I love books like that, that beg to become such a part of my day that I begin to believe they're more than fictional characters. I would even enjoy a sequel to let me know what happens to them all later down the road...The story was well-told, full of surprises and twists and intrigue that kept me in its grip from the first page to the very end.I highly recommend Shooter!

I really wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. It has the tagline "The Breakfast Club meets We Need to Talk About Kevin." I wrote my Capstone paper for my degree on school shootings. During my research, I read many books on school shootings, both fiction and nonfiction, including, We Need to Talk About Kevin. For me, this book missed the mark on both its comparison to The Breakfast Club and We Need to Talk About Kevin which was really disappointing to me.Shooter primarily takes place in the boy's bathroom of a high school that is in lockdown. The main characters include Hogan - the jock, Isabelle - the school princess, Alice- brain -Xander - the weird one and Noah who is autistic. I thought the sections told from Noah's point of view were interesting. They were told through his thoughts and through pictures. I cannot even begin to imagine what it would be like for someone with autism to be in a school lockdown situation where there is an active shooter and loud noises and tension rolling off the other students in waves.Now let's look at the caricatures of the jock, the princess, and the weird one. Hogan played football until there was an incident resulting in his brother's death. Now the other students are afraid of him and spreading rumors about him. (This is not a spoiler - we learn this basic info early on). Hogan's behavior feels authentic to how someone in his situation behave. He is probably my favorite character in the book.Alice is good student and loves writing. She's quiet and none as "the weird guys" sister. I find it really hard to believe that in the world we live in now that other students would refer to Noah as "the weird guy." I'm not saying that people with autism don't get picked on or made fun of - but the fact that none of the other kids know that he is autistic is weird to me. Anyway, I digress. Alice cares deeply about her brother and has taken all the responsibility for her brother onto her shoulders almost to the point of having a martyr mentality.Isabelle is so vapid and unlikable in my opinion. I feel like the authors depiction of her is the least real portrayal in the book. Isabelle supposedly is the queen bee of the school and has all this pressure to be popular both in school and from her parents. She supposedly had this life changing experience that made her see life differently, but that doesn't ring true to me. She's so shallow. She knows they are in lockdown because of an active shooter, and she spends the time in lockdown complaining about her life and her boyfriend. To me this just doesn't ring true. These seem like pretty shallow things to be talking about or thinking about when you could be shot and killed. This character just doesn't ring true to me.Xander is the mysterious weird kid. He likes taking pictures, is obsessed with X-Men and has weird conversational habits. The author never outright says it, but to me Xander feels like he also has a form of autism or possibly Asperger's. He sees the world differently than his fellow students and he doesn't pick up on social cues or societal norms. He reminds me very much of a friend of mine that has Asperger's. While Hogan is favorite characters, I think Xander is one of the most interesting because of how he sees the world. His Social Autopsies showed us an interesting glimpse of who he is as a character.The Shooter - whose identity I will not spoil, is the least fleshed out of all the characters. To compare him to Kevin, from We Need to Talk About Kevin, is a major reach. This character seems more like an afterthought. I feel like we don't really know him or his real motivations. For me, the reason I wrote my Capstone paper on school shootings is because I'm a bit obsessed with knowing the shooter(s). Why did they do it? What lead up to this? What is the motivation? Where did we fail as a society with this person to make them feel that killing classmates and teachers is the answer to life's problems. We don't really have that with the shooter in this book. We get small glimpses but not a lot of why. There is so much depth in We Need to Talk About Kevin. We really get deep into his psyche and it's a twisted and dark place. There really is no comparison between these two characters or even these two books.I gave this book 3 stars because I did enjoy reading it and it was a fast read, but it lacked the depth and the emotion that I was looking for. In the end, lives are changed - which you would expect from an active shooter situation. I just don't find this book very believable.

This book didn't want me to stop reading this. I couldn't stop reading this it was just too good to stop.

I recently heard about this book when the author made an appearance on a local TV show (Our Ottawa). I'm so glad I did! The book is gripping from cover to cover, as Pignat weaves her story of five very different high school students stuck in a boy's bathroom during what turns out to be a frighteningly real lockdown. I especially loved the wonderful care the author took in her character development, beginning with the typical superficial "posturing" and quick, dismissive and/or suspicious views they each have of each other, then carefully revealing and building on the invisible secrets and gifts hiding within each person's real story. By the end of the book, each character became so real to me that I genuinely cared what happened to them. When I had to put the book down to do more menial things like housework and meal preparation, the story kept calling to me and I found myself worried for these kids, wondering what was happening next...I love books like that, that beg to become such a part of my day that I begin to believe they're more than fictional characters. I would even enjoy a sequel to let me know what happens to them all later down the road...The story was well-told, full of surprises and twists and intrigue that kept me in its grip from the first page to the very end.I highly recommend Shooter!

Well written, kept me reading. Fast delivery.