An angry teenager guns down dozens of his classmates,
politicians offer platitudes, and nothing changes. You've heard this story
before—from fiction writers as varied as Walter Dean Myers and Jodi
Picoult and, most vividly, on the evening news, in a country that sees an
average of nearly one mass shooting a day. But in joining this tragic canon,
Tom McAllister's haunting second novel,
How to Be Safe, centers
not on the event that sets the larger crisis in motion, but on its aftermath,
when traumatized residents veer between grace and madness. The fictional
Pennsylvania town where the tale is set was once named America's friendliest,
which makes what's transpired all the more unthinkable. For high school English
teacher Anna Crawford, the sense of surreality is even stronger when she's
named a "person of interest." At the time of the incident—68
wounded, 19 of them killed—Anna was serving a suspension for ranting
about her job on social media, an outburst that both saved and ruined her life.
Though her name is soon cleared, she's unable to convince her neighbors (or the
online misogynist hordes) of her innocence, and she becomes a lightning rod for
the suspicion and fury gripping the increasingly militarized community. But
while Anna flirts with the collective hysteria—visiting an armed
militia, taking steps to join a doomsday sect—she ultimately refuses
to succumb. At a public meeting, she urges the town to dig a massive hole and
bury the country's firearms, arguing that peace is the only acceptable memorial
for victims of violence. Like the Parkland survivors, she recognizes that
silence is complicity, as is sticking to the same "solutions":
prayer, paranoia, and more guns.
