Dills and his mom have returned to Hamilton, her hometown, hoping to leave the horrors of Windsor behind. But it’s impossible to escape the echoes of tragedy, and trouble always follows trouble.
When Dills hurts a new classmate, it comes out in court that he was in the Windsor High library when the shooter came in. But he won’t talk about what he saw, what he still sees whenever he closes his eyes. He can’t. He definitely can’t tell anyone that the Windsor Shooter is his stepfather, Jesse, that Jesse can speak into his mind from hundreds of kilometres away, and that Dills still loves him even though he committed an unspeakable crime.
It's one of those mini coincidences I notice every so often; this is the second book recently to deal with horrific grief and all the ways we can deal with it.
Dills is in an awful position; his beloved stepfather, a deeply patriotic soldier who probably suffers from PTSD, has committed a school shooting. Although the man is technically still alive, he's in a deep coma and will never wake up. Dills, his mother and the families of the dead students will never get any answers; they will never know why Jesse did what he did, what he was thinking and feeling. It makes moving on, finding closure, extremely difficult.
This is an unusual point of view for this kind of story; I've read books about shootings before, but I don't think I've ever read one where the main character was so intimately connected. Refreshingly, he doesn't seem to carry any real guilt about Jesse's actions; there's no what-if-I'd-seen, what-if-I'd-asked or anything like that. He has serious survivor's guilt, but that's only to be expected after what he's been through.
This isn't an action packed story; it's a very slow, gentle examination of three months of his life, an unspecified amount of time after everything has happened, how he and his family are slowly recovering. It's a lovely examination of how families can break and heal over time.
Not action packed, but a great read.
Not action packed, but a great read.
Nothing But Life publishes on the 6th April, 2021. I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
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