Deep reading

Hate List
by Jennifer Brown

Why are the surnames Brown, White and Green common but not Yellow, Orange or Red?  Who knows.  And I'm off-topic.  For a reason.

Reason being that once I read a few novels by an author whose surname was Brown.  I don't remember her first name and don't see any reason to.  They were dreck. Chaff.  Fluff at best.  Thrill rides on the imaginary rollercoaster of romantic love.

Those were books.  This is a book.  Both are cataloged under the general category of words on pages sandwiched between cardboard covers.  But, in my very humble opinion, this, is a book.
From the cover blurb,

• Five months ago, Valerie Lefman's boyfriend, Nick, opened fire on their school cafeteria.  Shot trying to stop him, Valerie inadvertantly save the life of a classmate, but was implicated in the shootings because of the list she helped create.  A list of people and things she and Nick hated.  The list he used to pick his targets.

The story unfolds in both present and past, with the facts of the shootings as chapter notes before Valerie's current day existence--if you can call it that.  It's more like a quest for existence in a suffocating swamp of guilt and shame and confrontations with all the people who just can't understand. To people who lost their best friends, Nick was the embodiment of pure evil--how else could they deal with their pain?  Evil had taken their friends--not random chance or mental illness or a small-town teenage culture of bullying.  But to Valerie, Nick was not the ultimate evil.  He was her boyfriend--kind, funny, gentle and loving.  No more evil than you or me.

And her family is so damn real you just want to smack them!  There are some things the author leaves unspoken and I hesitate to put my own feelings into the story, but I came away with a strong theory that most of her father's animosity is based on guilt of his own, guilt he will never admit.  If he'd been there--if he'd been a real father--would she have made "better choices"?  Would his own name have been left off the Hate List?

Better shut up.  I'm telling too much.  All I can say to recommend it is this: I read three-quarters of it in one sitting (300 pages); I bawled my eyes out when I re-read the ending; I wanted there to be more closure but won't complain.  Real life doesn't have closure.  It just continues.