Education Week - August 29, 2018 - 14

School Shootings Reverberate
In World of Young Adult Fiction
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

retired this summer after 40 years of teaching middle
school and high school English, finishing at Morenci
High, where she taught Martinez.
Referring to the 240 students at the high school, Kruger said, "Do they just dismiss this idea, and think this
will never happen in our little town? No, they're afraid."

'A Feeling of Uncertainty'
The works of young adult fiction are part of a larger
body of literature, movies, TV shows, and other popular
entertainment that has addressed mass school shootings.
But while many works aimed at a mass audience are
being consumed by teenagers, young adult fiction is
geared specifically to them. And there has been a steady
stream of such books about school shooters.
"The biggest way to get a high school-age student
to get off their phone and read a book is to find something that really relates to them," said Jessica North,
who taught English for eight years at Gloucester High
School in Gloucester, Va., before becoming the school librarian there last year.
After the Parkland shooting, North said more students
at her school checked out young adult titles such as Give
a Boy a Gun, a 2002 book by Todd Strasser; Hate List, a
2009 work by Jennifer Brown; and Shooter, a 2004 title
by Walter Dean Myers. (There's also a 2017 young adult
work titled Shooter, by Caroline Pignat.)
"There's a feeling of uncertainty they have, like maybe
they could know the person who could commit such an
act," North said. "They want to relate and
know that their feelings are authentic."

schools.
"To walk into a school and see stickers on the doors
to say this is a 'gun-free zone' was quite confrontational
in a way that I didn't fully anticipate," Nijkamp said in
an interview.
She wrote This Is Where It Ends, which was on The
New York Times best sellers list for 72 weeks, to gain
a better understanding of heinous acts such as mass
school shootings.
"I come from a country that has pretty much had no
school shootings," Nijkamp said.
A fictional account "is the perfect way to get close to
the experience of what it would be like to be in this location that feels like a relatively safe space and then turns
into a battleground," she said.
Nijkamp embraces the young adult fiction category.
"Teenage readers are not an easy audience," she said.
"They are relentlessly curious and interested in their
place in the world, and not necessarily as cynical as
other readers, which is a joy in itself for the author."
Young adult novels about mass school shootings "are
part of the Zeitgeist," for now, she said. "Hopefully, at
some point, they will just be works of fiction."
For Martinez, such fiction is just a piece of her literary diet.
"But if another [school shooter] book came out that
drew my interest, I would probably read it," Martinez
said.
In fact, as the school year came to an end in June, she
put one more book about a school shooter on her summer to-read list: a 2015 collaboration by 17 young adult
authors and edited by Shaun David Hutchinson titled
Violent Ends.

A Comfort
That view was echoed by Kruger, the
recently retired teacher whose blog
about young adult literature is called
Reading Junky's Reading Roost.
While her fellow English teachers
tended to assign the high school literature classics, Kruger said she had permission for many years to teach with
young adult fiction, whether it was teen
vampire and werewolf stories, or edgier
works about school shooters or police
brutality.
"You can use these books to look for
metaphors and similes, and teach all
the literary techniques," added Kruger,
Project X, a 2004 book by Jim Shepard, focuses on a sullen and tormented
who is a part-time instructor teaching
middle school student, who plots with his only close friend to shoot up their
children's and adolescent literature at
school. The film adaptation, "And Then I Go," was released this spring.
Siena Heights University in Adrian,
Mich.
YOUNG ADULT FICTION: Give a Boy a Gun, by Todd Strasser (2002); Hate List, by
Martinez, the rising sophomore, said
her parents expressed some concern
Jennifer Brown (2009); This Is Where It Ends, by Marieke Nejkamp (2016); and
about her embrace of the sub-genre.
Shooter, by Caroline Pignat (2017); Violent Ends, a 2015 collaboration by 17
But the student was quick to point out
young adult authors, edited by Shaun David Hutchinson.
that she also reads other types of books,
including mysteries, and has other high
FICTION: Empire Falls, by Richard Russo (2001), which includes a pivotal
school interests, such as band.
subplot that involves a school shooting; Only Child, by Rhiannon Navin (2018),
Martinez said that at times last
is one of the rare works to present an incident akin to the killings of young
school year she would walk around
children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.; Jodi Picoult's
Kruger's classroom and make book
Nineteen Minutes (2007), which focuses on the aftermath of a school shooting.
recommendations to her classmates,
which tended to be books about school
POETRY: Bullets into Bells, a 2017 anthology that addresses not only school
shootings.
shootings but other acts of mass violence, with contributions by such
Among the titles Martinez found
renowned poets as Richard Blanco and Rita Dove.
comforting were Give a Boy a Gun, and
Mercy Rule, by Tom Leveen, published
just days after the Parkland shooting;
and This Is Where It Ends, a 2016 book
by Marieke Nijkamp.
Nijkamp's book, about 54 harrowing minutes as a shooting unfolds at an Alabama high
For more on issues of school violence and school safety,
school told from four perspectives, is all the more revisit: www.edweek.org/go/school-safety
markable because it was written by an author who was
born, raised, and lives in the Netherlands and who admits to being a little freaked out when she visits U.S.

LITERATURE

14 | EDUCATION WEEK | August 29, 2018 | www.edweek.org

"I Don't Like Mondays," a 1979 hit
by the Irish band The Boomtown
Rats, evoked a shooting at a
San Diego elementary school
from earlier that year and the
dispirited explanation by the
16-year-old perpetrator. Other
songs range from the satirical
"The Homecoming Queen's Got
a Gun," (1983) by Julie Brown to
"The Nobodies," the 2001 song
by the dark industrial rock band
Marilyn Manson that alludes to
the Columbine shootings.

MUSIC

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