When Angie is awakened by a midnight call from an officer with the Boise Police Department, she thinks there must be a misunderstanding. The officer tells her that her husband was involved in a shooting at a local bar, but how can that be possible when her husband is sleeping right next to her? Except when she turns to wake him, he isn’t there.
Tessa is the twenty-three-year-old bartender who escapes to a backroom storage closet during the shooting. When it comes to light that five people were killed, she is burdened with the question of why she survived.
Joyce wakes up to a knock at her front door, a knock she assumes is her wayward son, Jed, who must have lost his keys. It’s not Jed, though. Two police officers tell her that Jed is dead, shot at the bar. Then they deliver even worse news: “We have reason to believe your son was the shooter.”
So begins the story of three women tied together by tragic fate—a wife trying to understand why her now-comatose husband was frequenting a bar in the middle of the night, the young woman who her husband was apparently pursuing, and a mother who is forced to confront the reality of who her son was and who she is.
Review: Wow what a book this was. Before you read any further this book has care warnings for gun crime and mass shootings but if you can get past that I highly highly recommend picking up this amazing character driven novel. I could not put this down.
I love a character driven novel and I love it even more when we have multiple narrative and this book has that by the bucket load. Not only do we follow Tessa, Angie and Joyce but we also get to hear some of the other stories from people at the bar the night of the shooting. They only get one chapter each but some of those really pack a punch.
I loved getting to know Angie. I think she was the character I connected with most. She is a typical modern woman trying to have family and career and struggling to get support from her husband Cale. Through Angie we get to know Cale and he is really the key that links so much of the happenings in this book. Kim Hooper does such a good job of drip feeding the information though, giving us tiny facts and incidents here and there so we never really know Angie and Cale right until the very end.
I found Tessa really intriguing as a character. Like Angie, her life kind of has to keep going after everything happened and I think she had the biggest fall out after the incident. She is such an old head on young shoulders type of person and I really loved how this author threw obstacles at Tessa and we get to see how she deals with them. I would love to know what is next for her and really hope perhaps we could meet her again in future books.
Joyce was probably the hardest of the three women to get to know, like deep down know what makes her tick get to know. She is very guarded and she has her reasons for being so. I feel like we almost can only get to know Joyce through Angie and through Tessa and here is where the beloved mixed media text comes in because we also get to know Joyce through some online message boards about the incident and I think those were really telling and really helped to move the plot of the book along.
Overall I found these women and their stories so compelling. I tried to guess what was going to happen to all three of them but I had no idea things would play out the way that they did. I loved the writing and I loved the characters in this book and whilst it deals with a shocking and hotly contested topic, I think that it did so in a sensitive and considered way. I really recommend this novel.
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