Silent Alarm

December 15, 2014
Unassuming violinist Alys finds her life tragically altered when her older brother Luke kills 15 people, including himself, in a school shooting. The book opens with the shooting itself, told in tense, lyrical and viscerally felt detail. Recognizing Alys huddled under a table, Luke chillingly, incongruously pauses his rampage to tell her "Hey." Luke shoots the girl hiding next to Alys, and later, when Alys brushes her hair, she finds "tiny pieces of bone matted in the long strands." After the shooting, both Alys' best friend, Delilah, and her boyfriend, Ben, whose sister was one of Luke's victims, distance themselves from Alys. Her father drinks heavily, and her parents fight while reporters wait outside their home. Two storytelling devices successfully evoke Alys' pain and bewilderment in the shooting's aftermath. Thoughts that cannot yet be spoken aloud appear in italicized parentheticals set off by line breaks: "The Luke I thought I knew wasn't / (a killer)." Additionally, Luke and some of his victims appear as visions and speak to Alys, giving voice to the absent Luke and to Alys' own grief. The near uniformity with which Alys is shunned after the incident, however, seems oversimplified, and the hostility of Ben's mother in particular is almost a caricature. Overall, a moving, insightful treatment of a difficult and timely topic. (Fiction. 14-18)

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January 1, 2015

Gr 10 Up-Lunchtime will never be the same. What sounded like cherry bombs, were actually gunshots exploding throughout the halls of Plainewood High School where Alys Aronson and her brother, Luke, were students. A violinist in the making, Alys was trying to master a piece by Brahms, Violin Sonata No. 3 in D minor, while her classmate Miranda studied for a history test nearby, when Luke entered with a rifle in hand. After witnessing her brother kill Miranda, Alys tries to come terms with the terrible event in this gripping narrative. In between the unbearable grief and feelings of being ostracized by her friends and the community, the teen learns to accept herself as someone more than the sister of a murderer. Readers will dive into each page as the author unfolds just what drove Luke to make such a horrible decision, even after being accepted to one of the top schools in the country. A captivating portrait of a family torn apart by jealousy and neglect.-Keisha Miller, South Orange Public Library, NJ

Copyright 2015 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2015
Grades 9-12 Banash confronts a traumatic subject with compassion in her latest novel, which begins with a school shooting and focuses on the aftermath, seen through the lens of the shooter's sister, Alys. When her older brother, Luke, drives her to school that morning, Alys has no idea that he is carrying a gun, but at 12:30 he enters the crowded library where she is studying and methodically kills 15 people before ending his own life. Though he spared Alys, among the dead is her boyfriend's sister, whose family has been close to Alys' family their entire lives. As Alys tries to understand why her brother did this and searches for signs that she missed, the stricken community turns against her and her parents. This wrenching novel gets all of the emotional beats right, eschewing the shock value for authentic reactions from Alys, her family, and her friends. While this is a thriller only in the opening, Banash's expressive language keeps the internally focused narrative compelling. Despite the dark subject, Banash ends on a hopeful note for Alys' future.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2015
Alys Aronson feels defined as the sister of a boy who shot down fifteen people in their suburban-Wisconsin high school before taking his own life, and she's haunted by a girl she witnessed Luke kill. In this timely and engrossing but melodramatic story of a tragedy's aftermath, Alys confronts loss and alienation as she seeks a way to heal.

(Copyright 2015 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)