Silent Alarm

Silent Alarm is about a school shooting, told from the perspective of the shooter's sister. This book broke my heart and provided brutal insight into how we so often assign blame to those who are left behind to answer for the actions of the people they loved.

The story of Alys in the aftermath of her brother's school shooting and suicide is compelling and disturbing. The author does a beautiful job of getting inside Alys' head as she struggles with the anguish and despair of not just losing her brother, but her social group, friends, and even the rest of her family as they all struggle to come to grips with what her brother dead. What I enjoyed most about this book was that the author offers no neat and tidy answers - there is no happy ending nor any real conclusive resolution - which reflects the likely reality of the unfortunate people caught in this situation. Wonderfully written, the book caught my attention and would not let go until I finished it.

I liked the perspective from the shooters family. It was well written and very good. Highly recommend. I read it it in 3 days.

It looks at school violence from a whole different perspective. I like that it doesn't try to wrap everything up neatly--it is messy and confusing.

See more of my reviews on The YA Kitten! My copy was a hardcover I got for review from YA Books Central.Stories of school shootings and other general tragedies are strangely fascinating despite the morbid nature of them. I guess I’m just weird. How else are multiple books written and multiple documentaries made trying to help us understand how the Columbine massacre happened? When high school students commit that kind of violence, people want to understand what was going on in their minds. Fictionalized novels of such crimes are bound to follow as another attempt to understand. Silent Alarm is a solid novel, but it never gets to the heart of the issue.The prologue in which the shooting goes down and Alys stares down the barrel of the gun held by her own older brother is a chilling scene no one will forget any time soon. It made me tear up personally because of how close I came to being Alys and my brother being Luke once upon a time, but it’s a startling sort of scene that stands strong on its own even without any personal connection.The subsequent fallout, Alys’s family’s exile from their community as they’re blamed for what Luke did before he killed himself, and the implosion of their family is painful to read at times, especially when it comes time to bury Luke. If you’re looking for something to make you emotional and possibly even make you cry, Silent Alarm is a good bet. It never got me quite to the point of flat-out sobbing, but the misty eyes struck me more than a few times (see: everything about Alys’s prom, which has my heart aching just thinking about it).Still, it doesn’t hit as hard as it should considering everything Alys is going through. She clearly has a case of PTSD as shown by her hallucinations of Luke and her friend Miranda plus her flashbacks, but she gets no treatment for it whatsoever and it goes away on its own. It’s a rather irresponsible, disrespectful way to write about a mental illness that affects millions of people for reasons ranging from rape to war to shootings just like this one. Banash never digs into the meat of why Luke did it either. We read these novels to try and see exactly that but get no answers here. It’s a bit frustrating. Some shooters like Adam Lanza leave behind no traces of why the way Luke does, but then shooters like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris and Seung-Hui Cho and Elliott Rodger do. They’re the majority here.For all its flaws, Banash’s sophomore novel is reminiscent of Jennifer Brown’s YA novels like Hate List in the best possible ways–and that’s not something I say lightly as a huge fan of Hate List. Fans of Jennifer Brown and other hard-hitting contemporary writers will find a beautiful, painful novel in Silent Alarm.

Alys Aronson's life is forever changed when her brother, Luke, shoots and kills fifteen people.Alys was in the library when the gunshots started and though she'll never know why, her brother did decide to spare her that day. But in the aftermath of that terrible tragedy, and even though Luke took his own life the day of the shooting, Alys and her family become the focus of the town's frustration and misery. What's worse, Alys will never be able to understand why her brother did what he did that horrible morning.SILENT ALARM was a tough read. Jennifer Banash forces the reader to take a step back and consider the immediate families of the perpetrators of these incidents. It's a hard thing to consider - that even when the killer is gone the family themselves, while also grieving, are not only the focus of investigations but public scrutiny and contempt as well. And reconciling the emotions attached to the loss of loved ones and the anger against the person responsible without also including the immediate family is understandably hard for anyone in these events. Were they in any way responsible? What did they know? Could they have prevented the whole thing?In this situation, there seem to be no real extenuating circumstances: Alys and Luke's parents are normal parents and their family an average one. Alys admits that they'd all seen a change in Luke, but nothing that would obviously point to such a tragic end. In fact, the harder she tries to look for an explanation the more out of reach it seems to become. Even worse, Alys feels guilty for grieving the loss of her brother - the brother who was always there for her, helping and supporting her for over a decade. The brother who murdered her classmates. That this person is one and the same is almost impossible for Alys to comprehend.The subject of SILENT ALARM isn't an easy one to approach - either for a reader or, I believe, for a writer, but I though Banash did a great job. She humanizes the family and the killer. She makes the reader consider the way mass shootings affect everyone. And she forces you to consider that at least sometimes there is no explanation, that sometimes there is no one to blame once the killer is gone, and that in those cases the killer's family are also victims.

I like the idea of this book, but wow, is it ever slow. You would think, considering the storyline, things would move a little more quickly. This book is not for me.