Customer Reviews

Give a Boy a Gun

5 star:		(71)
4 star:		(37)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Good fiction encourages the reader to think hard about the issues that affect our lives. The very best fiction does that and more - it encourages us to act on those issues. In this powerful, honest, and disturbing novel about guns and school violence, Todd Strasser gives voice to the victims, classmates, neighbors, parents, and students who held the guns - both fictional and real - and asks the reader what he can do to make a difference. Strasser goes beyond just the issue of gun control by presenting a compelling look at the intolerance that pervades our schools. He implores our educators and children to celebrate the differences that make us human, to value accomplishments beyond those on the athletic fields, and to recognize that marching to a different drummer is not cause for ridicule. I applaud Strasser, a fiction author, who uses his craft and his gift to encourage readers to be part of the solution to violence that is unnecessarily costing young lives.

Taking today's headlines and combining them with fictional faces and more than enough quotes and statistics to terrify his readers, Todd Strasser presents his newest YA novel, Give A Boy A Gun (2000). The novel is a combination of statements given by witnesses to a well thought out gun attack by 2 teens against their peers and teachers at a school dance. The book is similar to Making up Megaboy (Virginia Walter, 1998) in that the story is presented from multiple perspectives versus narrative form. But unlike Megaboy, this book takes you inside the lives of its killers and gives their rationale for their actions as well as their intimate suicide letters. This is an incredibly well researched and thought out book. It will definitely raise the eyebrows of many parents because of its violence level and subject matter. It was written for YA's and will make them think long and hard about gun control, but I feel that librarians and teachers alike would be remiss if they did not read it for themselves. Includes further sources for information. Partial proceeds from the book will go to gun control charities. Highly recommended for older teens and adults. Not for the weak of stomach. A definite best book candidate. Controversy will follow this book wherever it goes.

When I started reading the book, I was amazed to discover that it was not a non fiction book. The style and wording of the author makes the book extremely plausible, and the fact that it is based on true occurences adds to that. In "Give a Boy a Gun", Todd Strasser tells the story of two boys who hold their school hostage during a dance. The reason: revenge on the football players and teachers. The book is written from the view points of friends and family, school staff, e-mails between the gunmen and chatroom conversations between the gunmen and their friends. At the bottom of most every page are facts about violence and shootings. At the back of the book is a section about violent shootings and occurences that happened while the book was being written, and another brief section of certin school shootings.

In this fictitious story about a post-Columbine school shooting, best friends Brendan and Gary seek revenge against the bullies who've made their lives hell. The author clearly states that there is no simple answer to the problem of school violence, but he fails to hide his views. He implies that guns are bad, most kids are out of control, video games are harmful, kids "choose" to kill because they don't fit in, they may be victims themselves but in the end they get what they deserve. As a 13 year-old reader, I felt that this book offered a simplistic view. I would only recommend this book to young teens and "reluctant readers".

There are several problems with how the author chooses to tell this story. The characters are stereotypical and it's difficult to feel anything for them. They come with a sticker on their forehead saying "jock," "stoner," etc. The real world isn't that simple. Behind every label is a real person with real feelings and sometimes pent-up feelings can cause kids to do the unthinkable. The footnotes are distracting. Strasser may be trying to protect younger readers by not using strong language or graphic imagery but there's nothing innocent about a school shooting. If an author feels that he has to censor his characters' thoughts for fear of offending readers then maybe he should pick a different topic.

Instead of focusing solely on guns we should look at other problems like the lack of respect for others, the lack of communication between parents and their kids, teachers and their students, kids and their peers. Boys are raised to believe that it's wrong to talk about feelings. A lot of guys feel powerless and confused and for some guys who don't fit in, a gun is the only way out. There's a line in Gary's suicide note that says, "Mom, I could never tell you how unhappy I was." I think this is true for a lot of boys. Why can't we talk to grownups about our problems? Why are we taught to "grin and bear it"? Why are we taught that in order to be successful we must conform? These may be some of the reasons why kids turn to violence.

I painfully recall those couple of years in my early adolescence when I really got pushed around a lot. For me it was junior high in the late 60's when I'd be constantly harassed by older or bigger kids. Walk down the hall or down the stairs and get tripped or shoved into a locker or have your books slammed out of your arms sending your papers flying everywhere. Sit on the school bus and be whacked with a book by a passerby or have your hat snatched. Occasionally I remember an even bigger kid coming along and asserting his dominance over the bully who was picking on me -- yep, that was me, the bottom of the food chain--but usually these incidents became solitary, painful memories of the time when I was a good, quiet student treading water in a sea of raging hormones.

I cannot recall ever having the urge to exact revenge (beyond a hand gesture). But, then again, it was a time that, in retrospect, seemed to pass soon enough as I came into my own in high school. But what would I have been like if I'd had to endure year after year of such torture through high school as well as junior high?

In GIVE A BOY A GUN by Todd Strasser, we meet two teenage boys who, after enduring years of torture by their school's most popular students, do take revenge. In a fictional account which recalls real-life school shootings in Littleton (CO), Jonesboro (AK), and Springfield (OR), the two teens take a group of students and teachers hostage at a dance in the high school gymnasium.

Strasser presents the story in the form of quotes by the teens (Brendan Lawlor and Gary Searle) as well as their friends, their tormentors and other schoolmates, current and former teachers, their parents and neighbors.

At the foot of many pages the author provides us with facts concerning gun availability, violence and manufacture as well as quotes relating to those tragic real episodes which have been occurring in schools across America. (Information Strasser has compiled includes the federal estimate that there are roughly 250 million people and 240 million firearms in America, that 12 percent of students say they know another student who has brought a gun to school, and that in 1996 there were more than 6,000 American students expelled for bringing a gun to school.)

In the story we learn how the physical and verbal abuse heaped daily upon the two teens by popular football players and the in-crowd is tolerated by the faculty. We meet teachers who, themselves, treat the unpopular kids as outcasts in the classroom. As Allison Findley (Gary's girlfriend) points out: "If Deirdre Bunsun is talking in world history, it's like 'Excuse me, Deirdre, now pay attention.' But if Allison Findley is talking, Ms. Arnold stops the class and stares at her. And then the rest of the kids stare at her. It's a light slap on the wrist for Dierdre, it's public humiliation for Allison."

We come to understand how Brendan, Gary, and their little circle of friends seek to escape from unremitting daily reinforcement of the message that they are worthless vermin. We hear from Gary's mom who was concerned about his spending the better part of Saturdays "cocooned within his quilt." We learn how Brendan grows up hating and reacting to injustices, is at one point compared to Rosa Parks by an old friend, and tries to take out his aggressions on video games. We see transcripts of their chatroom discussions. We hear how over a period of years the boys' desire to kill the kids who are torturing them evolves from the relatively innocent anger of youngsters to the determined and complicated planning that leads to the story's climactic evening in the gymnasium. Allison Findley wonders at one point about the darkness that she has seen developing in Brendan: "I don't know where it came from. Whether it had always been inside him, or whether it just started to grow because of the way people treated him in school."

Several of the story's most insightful quotes are from an overburdened school counselor, Beth Bender, who survives that night in the gym: "And that's when I had an epiphany. Can't you see why they were doing it? They had no protection. They couldn't get away from the bullies and tormentors. Not here, not in jail, not anywhere. So why not kill them? So why not kill themselves? What difference would it make either way? In another passage Beth refutes the assertion that this was an unpreventable act by crazies. "Every year you hear about kids walking into their school and shooting classmates and teachers. You don't hear about them walking into McDonald's and shooting people. They don't go to the town swimming pool or the movies and do it. Most of these kids live in neighborhoods with elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. But they don't go to some other school. They always go to their own school. It's not random. It's a message, and the sooner we wake up and listen, the better.

A message that Beth wants us to hear is that parents, teachers, administrators, and thoughtful students with influence on their peers need to begin the process of instituting programs and procedures to teach conflict resolution, to teach respect for one another's differences, and to prohibit the teasing, the physical and the verbal abuse that we see Gary and Brendan having to endure from all the way back in grade school. There needs to be zero tolerance of name-calling and the other abuse these boys are subjected to. Of course, the book's other theme is the gun issue. It appears that the debate over guns in America will continue beyond my lifetime, but, clearly, the fact that temperamental, hormonal teenagers are so easily able to obtain guns is an issue that has got to be addressed sooner rather than later.

Todd Strasser surely has written one of the year's most thought-provoking books. Fail to read it at your own risk.
Richie Partington...

When an author decides to write a story about a school shooting, the unwritten rule is that the author (unless a psychopath) is going to write a story that says school shootings are bad. We don't challenge this assumption because it's inherently moral. At the same time, any book that discusses school shootings shouldn't render the shooters as demonized villains. When kids start killing other kids the reasons are complex and deep. A simple, "This is why it happened", is nearly impossible, and to this end Strasser is very adept. But here's where Strasser messes up: In "Give a Boy a Gun" we have two guys who live hellish lives and try to take it out on their persecutors. By the end of the book they've trapped everyone they hate in a gymnasium with guns and bombs. And at this point the reader SHOULD have been given enough information to say a) Yes, these boys are victims and I can understand where they're coming from and b) Killing people is wrong anyway. Strasser drills home the first point perfectly. Strasser misses the second point by a mile.

Gary and Brendan (perfect middle-America names) hate high school. It's just their bad luck to be living in a particularly sports crazy town. In Middletown, the high school jocks are granted particularly galling dispensations. Because they can bring their team and town incredible glory, they are treated like gods both in and out of school. This means that anyone who tangles with the glorious football players will inevitably end up on the losing side. The jocks take advantage of this system fully, and it only comes to a head when Brendan, an outsider who's transferred from another town, refuses to cow tow. The more the jocks try to teach him a lesson the worse it gets for Brendan and his reclusive and depressive friend Brendan. To them, high school is just a daily torture-fest and there is no hope in sight. Driven to believe that the only way out is to kill as many people they hate as possible as well as themselves, the two come up with a plan to take over a school dance and wreak revenge. Told after the events took place, this book is a series of interviews with the people involved, as well as copious footnotes. These footnotes provide useful facts about gun ownership in America, offering a sly anti-gun commentary to the book's events.
In a way, my favorite parts of this book were the footnotes. I mean, where else are you going to learn that the parents of the teen shooters in Jonesboro and Springfield were taught how to use guns as children, following the advice of the NRA? So two thumbs way way up for the factual evidence presented here. It's just the fictional portions I had problems with.

For one thing, I think Strasser made a mistake placing this story in a high school that is SO obsessed with sports. Most high schools where school shootings take place are normal high schools. THAT is why it's so important that all schools take anti-bullying precautions. Not just the ones that treat their jocks as some kind of royalty. Next, the book completely fails to express the horror of school shootings. Though the two boys do shoot people, nobody is ever killed. I'm not bloodthirsty and I don't like violence one bit, but if you have two seriously pissed off adolescent boys facing the people who've supposedly destroyed their lives, shouldn't at least one person get killed? But that's the thing. Though the boys are constantly shooting bullets into the ceiling, though they shoot two adults at point blank range, though they are prepared to kill everyone in that room, miraculously only one person has wounds that even suggest he might die. It takes guts to have your book's protagonists (sorry, but technically that's what they are) do horrible things. Strasser lacks those guts.

And speaking of horrible things, why is it never made clear that shooting a bunch of people is bad? Of the football players, you see several characters embody every villainous instinct imaginable. They're never fleshed out or made three-dimensional. If even one of the jocks that made the boys miserable said something even halfway interesting or (for lack of a better word) un-evil I'd be appeased. But Strasser likes dealing in black and white and that's it. The result is, when the boys start threatening to kill people you know that killing is bad but you're having a heckuva hard time not identifying with their need for blood. Characters say that what happened is awful and the reader isn't told why. Where is the discussion about the redeeming characteristics found in even the cruelest of popular clique members? Where is the diatribe against the circle of violence and how it never ends? We're given fact upon fact about the evil of guns but we?re never told WHY what they do is evil. This is a very serious flaw.

I dunno. I mean, the book has a great series of appendixes in its back regarding school shootings that occurred while this book was being written, a partial list of school shootings, books to consult on the topic, magazine articles about it, web sites, etc. There's even a note saying how a portion of the money generated from this book will go towards organizations working to established tougher gun control laws. I really wish Strasser had done a non-fiction work on this subject rather than a fictional tale. If you want stirring stories about this kind of stuff look up Walter Dean Myers's, "Shooter" or Francine Prose's fabulous, "After".

I find it hard to recommend this book despite its obvious relevance to contemporary issues for the simple reasons that it is politically skewed, unrealistic, and improperly targeted.

Strasser, in no uncertain terms, indicts gun culture in the united states for the violence we see within the novel and does everything in his power to paint a picture that leaves no room for any other factor. He differentiates their home lives, their individual characters, and the interactions they have with there friends just enough to leave us with the conclusion that our violence-crazed society is to blame for their horrible deed. Top these off with the liberally biased sources he uses for most of his facts and the author gives us the impression that Smith & Wesson is as guilty of this crime as Gary and Brendon.

By the end of the book Strasser has even done his best to trivialize the attackers entire reason for their assault; the persecution they received from the jock-centric culture at their high school. Granted, nothing justifies either what they did or what they intended to do, but in their mind it was justified, and I think the author fell short in truly expressing their motivation. At the end of the book I simply felt that the two teens were painted as extremely violent and showed more than enough warning signs (especially since the setting is specifically post-Columbine and even mentions Klebold and Harris by name) to have been apprehended before their deed was done.

I have to compliment the author on the way the story was told. The interviews from friends and family interspersed with text originating from the attackers did an excellent job of weaving the tail. I don't think, however that this book has the correct audience. It is marketed to juveniles when obviously the problems presented in the book can only be solved by society as a whole including parents, teachers, and other adults.

The narrative style was also compromised by the lack of realism. The censorship of expletives and the minimal amount of violence leaves the story with far less impact than it could have achieved. True, the story is intended for youths and has been adjusted accordingly; but this just calls into question the entire motivation of marketing this novel toward a solely juvenile audience.

Two stars. One for addressing the subject matter and one for the innovative method in which the story is told.

This is a book that I will recommend to every teacher and every student in the middle school where I teach. Never before have I understood how students who are labeled "outcasts" are treated, or how they really feel. This book is a fascinating look into what pushes young people to violence. Although I don't think that athletes are the only culprits in bullying, I believe they may be a bigger factor than I ever knew. I will be much more aware in my classroom and the hallways and will adopt a "no tolerance" stance on bullying and put-downs. I also was fascinated by the statistics on gun violence that Strasser placed along the bottom of the pages lest we forget that even though this book is fiction, school violence is a very real presence. If this book doesn't open up a dialogue in classrooms across America, nothing will. Parents, students, teachers--READ THIS!

This is the kind of book you read while muttering to yourself, "Wow! I didn't know that, I didn't know THAT...oh my!"

Except the reason you didn't know that is that much of it isn't true.

I work with kids, and am horrified by teen violence and bullying, and I feel Mr. Strasser genuinely wanted to make a difference to kids. It's just that in his zealotry, he misuses stats or mixes them or worse. He gives the definition of an automatic weapon when he means semi auto. He states that (x number) of students "say" they can easily obtain a gun as if that were a documentable fact. (Does anybody take it at face value when teens brag about anything else?)

He mixes the available stats concerning guns as a whole and the very specific category of handguns. And he fails to note that the country with the most liberal laws on gun ownership, Switzerland, has a low rate of violence. The audience for this book, will for the most part read it thinking they are learning amazing things, which is of course what Mr. Strasser was hoping for.

It's always a bad idea to use suspect facts when you are trying to prove a point. Yet I did think the writing was intriguing; the community all talking about the horrible incident and trying to make sense of it was delivered in very believable dialogue.

It is, at the least, a good conversation starter. But have the salt ready.

Middletown High School seems a school like any other. There are athletes, especially football players, who feel like they own the place. In some cases they are right; the teachers treat them with a different set of standards and allow them to get away with more than anyone else. There are lots of regular kids and at the other end of the spectrum from the football crowd are the students who are considered freaks. These are the students who are the constant targets of the football players and often of the teachers who recognize the way the system works. It's just like any other high school, and it is dangerous.

Gary and Brendan are two students who are considered freaks. They are constantly bullied by the athletes. They are called names, pushed in the halls, and sometimes they are worried about worse violence. The athletes think they deserve their bad treatment for having no school spirit, for not buying into the glory of athletics. They did it to themselves, some people think. But to Brendan and Gary, it's simply an unfair system that forces them to feel upset and angry every day.

These boys aren't content to just feel angry, though. After years of being pushed around and treated badly, they have finally decided to do something about it, to fight back. They are going to make many of their fellow students and even some of their teachers pay with their lives. They are going to shoot some and bomb others. When the night of the big dance comes, will they be able to pull off this plot? Will someone notice something is terribly wrong and step in?

I liked how the story was told from so many points of view, so you could see how most people didn't think they were doing anything wrong. Even the tormentors couldn't seem to see the results of their actions. I liked the facts about guns at the bottoms of the pages; I was surprised by some of the information.

At the end of the book, many of the characters didn't get it. They still thought the whole tragedy was because Brendan and Gary were crazy, instead of looking at themselves as being partly to blame.