Book Review: Numb to This: Memoir of a Mass Shooting by Kindra Neely

December 6, 2022 StephanieLeave a comment

I usually wait until I have a few graphic novels under my belt and then do a mass review, but this book deserves a review all its own.

I learned about Numb to This: Memoir of a Mass Shooting by Kindra Neely (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2022) from, I think, Twitter a few weeks ago, and it immediately went onto my TBR. My library was in the process of getting a copy, and I got the email that it was ready for me fairly quickly. I knew this would be an important book, and it’s exactly as powerful as I expected it would be.

Trigger warnings exist here for, obviously, mass shootings, and a suicide attempt.

In this stunning debut graphic novel, Kindra Neely describes her account of the 2015 Umpqua Community College Shooting. She was a student there at the time, just a regular, average young adult, when her life changed entirely. Eight students and a professor were killed, and the shooter committed suicide.

Kindra and her friends weren’t wounded – not bodily, anyway. That doesn’t mean they weren’t affected. Kindra finds herself struggling with the symptoms of PTSD, having difficulty being in public, affected by panic attacks, depression, and numbness. And what seems like almost the greatest insult is that instead of being allowed to heal, she’s forced to return to the incident again and again as nearly every day, news alerts appear on her phone, informing her of the newest mass shooting, of the latest creation of more victims, more deaths, more people grappling with how to move on from this kind of life-changing terror.

It’s an ongoing process, and Kindra makes many efforts to heal. It’s not easy, though: therapy isn’t always easy to come by in this country (cost and availability are a massive problem), and it’s really difficult to talk to even our closest friends about emotional struggles. And collectively, our country has decided that owning guns is more important than human lives, or the ability to live our lives without fearing death at every turn, so the fear of this happening again never really goes away, something Ms. Neely addresses when she brings up the fact that someone who survived one mass shooting was killed in another here in the US. Utterly horrifying.

But this book talks about it. This is an in-your-face, colorful, art-filled book that talks about the horror that our indifference to mass shootings has wrought. It shows in full color what the aftermath looks like years out. It demands to be heard, and I think this is going to be one of the most important books of the year. This book should be on every library shelf; it should be accessible to every student out there. It should be in the faces of every weak-willed member of Congress who laugh awkwardly at questions about why they continue to force us to live like this.

Kindra Neely is amazing and so brave to use her voice and her talent to bring her pain to the forefront. I’m beyond impressed, and grateful that she’s taking this stand, when she shouldn’t have to.

Read this book as soon as you can, and start demanding better for all of us. We all deserve it.

fiction · romance

Book Review: Girl Gone Viral by Alisha Rai

August 10, 2020 Stephanie3 Comments

For the 2020 PopSugar Reading Challenge, I needed a book recommended by my favorite blog, vlog, podcast, or online book club, and what a perfect time to pick up Girl Gone Viral by Alisha Rai (Avon, 2020), who had popped up on an episode of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books that I had *so* enjoyed. She’s smart, funny, witty, and such a joy to listen to; she tells great stories, has an amazing laugh, and I seriously live for the episodes when Sarah from Smart Bitches has her on. I read Ms. Rai’s The Right Swipe last year; I enjoyed it, though it was a little harder for me to relate to Rhiannon’s driven sense of ambition (I’m, uh, way more laid back and go-with-the-flow!). I enjoyed her writing style, though, and was eager to read more from her. And lo and behold, Girl Gone Viral was available via my library’s ebooks with NO WAIT. It felt like I’d won the lottery when I hit that check out button.

Katrina King is more than a bit of a recluse, but she’s working on it. Panic attacks, agoraphobia, and PTSD have steered her life for years, but she’s been working with a therapist and doing everything she can to take back control, and step by step, she’s making it work, adding places outside her home she can travel to. What’s not working is her mad, unrequited crush on her bodyguard, Jasvinder. He’s perfect, beautiful, everything she could ever dream of wanting in a man, and she’s like 99.7% sure he views her as just a client. Sigh. When a photo of Katrina and another customer at a cafe, complete with speculative Twitter thread, goes viral, Jasvinder takes Katrina to hide out at his family farm where she can be safe from the prying eyes of the world and from the people in her past who don’t have the best intentions.

At the farm, Jasvinder’s long-avoided family drama is front-and-center, as are his feelings for the woman he’s been protecting for years. He’s in serious, serious love, but how can he admit that without sounding like a creep? As his past elbows its way forward, his family situation needs immediate attention, and he and Katrina begin to grow closer. But it’s their mutual growth that feeds their mutual attraction…maybe going viral isn’t the worst thing that could have happened…

LOVED. THIS. SO. MUCH. I got Katrina. I could relate. She’s determined and driven like Rhiannon, but in a quieter way, and what really spoke to me was her panic disorder and agoraphobia, both of which I’ve been diagnosed with. I was never as severely affected as she is, but I know the terror of being stricken with a panic attack in public, how scary and embarrassing it is. I’ve had to sit down on the floor while waiting in grocery lines (those used to be my worst places, the places most likely to cause a panic attack. Grocery stores are actually *really* common places for people to have panic attacks), which was really embarrassing at the time. I understood her needing to work to grow her list of places she could visit; I had to do the same, years ago, and there are *still* places that are hard for me to go on my own, but like Katrina, it’s something I try to work on and keep pushing myself. I don’t know that I’ve ever so fully related to a fictional character before. Alisha Rai has done a fabulous job at portraying a character with my exact same brain malfunction, and I’m impressed and grateful to see that so well-written and so expertly crafted and handled in fiction.

Jasvinder.

SWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON.

He’s a former Marine who struggles with PTSD and is dealing with something straight out of the headlines today, to which he reacts in completely understandable ways. He’s honorable, not wanting to overstep his boundaries with Katrina, but adorable in the ways that he loves her in secrecy. His love for and frustration with his family work together in such a realistic fashion; Ms. Rai nails family drama and the push/pull of navigating stressful relationships with family members over sensitive topics. Jas is seriously one of the most swoonworthy romance heroes I’ve read recently in contemporary romance, and I so enjoyed his chapters.

To sum it up, I adored this book. Loved Katrina, loved Jasvinder, loved their love story, loved Jasvinder’s dedicated, loving,opinionated family, loved his attempts to make new friends with Samson from The Right Swipe, loved Katrina’s friend group with Rhiannon and Jia (is Jia next???? OMG JIA IS NEXT AND I AM DYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYING! February is when this book is supposed to hit, and I for one am willing to fast-forward EVERYTHING to get there!!!). This was a lovely, lovely distraction from the mess of the outside world, and I didn’t want the book to end. Anyone know how to jump into the world of a book and never leave???

Visit Alisha Rai’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

fiction · YA

Book Review: The Things a Brother Knows by Dana Reinhardt

July 7, 2020 Stephanie1 Comment

Another prompt for the 2020 PopSugar Reading Challenge directed me to choose a book with more than 20 letters in its title. No problem! I went straight to my Goodreads TBR for this one, poked around, counted letters in a few different titles, and came up with The Things a Brother Knows by Dana Reinhardt (Wendy Lamb Books, 2010), which clocks in at 22 letters. Success, and one more book down from both this challenge and my TBR. I love when that happens.

Levi Katznelson’s brother is coming back from the Marines. It was a shock to his entire family when Boaz signed up; everyone had been expecting him to choose one of the many colleges that had been after him, but Boaz has always had a mind of his own. His three years of service have changed him, however, and it’s evident upon his return that something is deeply wrong. Boaz retreats to his room, sleeps, uses the computer, and does little else. Levi’s bewildered; what happened to Boaz over there? Why is he like this now?

When Boaz disappears after claiming to leave to hike the Appalachian Trail, Levi knows something is up, and with the aid of his best friends, he joins Boaz on his mystery trip. He’s bound and determined to understand this stranger who has replaced his brother, but how will he manage this when Boaz can barely even look at him, much less speak?

Oof. What a heavy, important book. Dana Reinhardt has captured the hurt and confusion of a younger brother who doesn’t quite understand what his older brother is going through, and whose parents feel powerless to intervene. What do you do when the brother you always admired comes back a different person, one who is clearly suffering, but whom you can’t even get a single word out of? Boaz has been deeply affected by the things he’s done and seen during his time in the Middle East, but since the military deemed him healthy enough to successfully re-enter civilian life, his parents feel as though he just needs time. Levi, less optimistic than his parents, isn’t so sure.

My favorite character out of the whole book had to be Dov, Levi and Boaz’s cantankerous yet loving Israeli grandfather. He pulls no punches but cares deeply for his grandsons, and he adds a bit of levity and gruff, warm fuzziness to the story. Levi’s a bit of an EveryTeen, conflicted about the war, not quite sure he understands the purpose of it, unable to decide if he’s pro- or anti-war, but concerned for how much it has obviously affected his brother. He’s always been a little bit in Boaz’s shadow, and having Boaz retreat from life, leaving Levi alone, is new territory for him. In The Things a Brother Knows, Levi’s forced to grow up quickly and learn a few things about the realities of war and its affects that he never thought he’d need to know.

Sad book with a hopeful ending, but it’d be excellent reading for teens with a sibling or a parent in the military, or for teens considering the military as a career or life path. I’m in favor of people understanding all the potential outcomes of what they’re getting into (and I say this as someone who was a military wife for six years). Boaz came back physically unharmed, but emotionally, that was a different story, and Ms. Reinhardt adroitly illustrates that war isn’t just about the injuries you can see, and that it doesn’t just affect those who serve.

Visit Dana Reinhardt’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.