If We Had Known

February 15, 2018
When her former student goes on a shooting spree at a mall in small-town Maine, a writing professor is faced with a moral challenge.Maggie Daley is the rare academic who loves teaching freshman comp. "She prided herself on coaxing even the most passive among them to care about their writing. Write about what matters, she insisted. Anything else is a waste of time." With that assignment, nearly three decades of students have poured out their hearts to her about their addictions, depression, grief, and eating disorders; it comes with the territory. Then one day, Nathan Dugan, whom she taught four years earlier, kills several people, including himself, at the local mall. The next day, one of Nathan's classmates posts on Facebook a recollection that the shooter had written "a paper that was really weird." Maggie is asked to go back and find Dugan's work in her files, and when she does, she makes the first of a series of very dubious decisions, ultimately involving both her daughter and her lover in the mess she creates. Maggie is not an easy character: plain, old-fashioned, and essentially friendless. Her husband left her because she's emotionally cold and obsessed with her teaching; since then, she's gone on to start an affair with a married colleague. Her only child, Anna, a second protagonist, suffers from extreme anxiety and anorexia, only barely controlled by medication and therapy. As this crisis hits, Anna is about to leave home for college, a difficult prospect for both mother and daughter. Unfortunately, both of these troubled characters start to lose their holds on the reader's sympathy (mother) and interest (daughter). Inspired by the Virginia Tech shooting, Juska's (The Blessings, 2014) story nests in a thicket of current issues: social media, gun violence, teenage anxiety and anorexia, and the responsibility of academics with regard to troubled students.Well-written, realistic, and suspenseful to the point of dread.

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March 15, 2018

Longtime English professor Maggie Daley teaches an introductory course required of all freshmen, in which students write about themselves, often revealing life-changing events and current struggles. Maggie has occasionally picked up on clues from troubled students, even preventing at least one suicide. When she learns that a former student has gone on a shooting rampage at the local mall, she recalls him as distant, cold, and unplugged in class. Searching through her records, she finds an essay he wrote that included minute descriptions of the many different kinds of weapons that could be used in hunting. Did the paper reveal problems she should have picked up on? Could she have done something then to prevent the shooting now? VERDICT Presenting realistic characters, Juska (The Blessings) explores the aftermath of a violent event in a story that successfully speaks to issues of gun violence, the rise of anxiety in young people, the use and abuse of social media, and the role of educators today, capturing human vulnerability and the impact of tragedy on survivors. Recommended for general fiction readers. [See Prepub Alert, 10/16/17.]--Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence

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May 28, 2018
An incident as timely as the day’s headlines—a mall shooting that leaves five dead, including the gunman—catalyzes the plot of this compassionate, searching novel. When Nathan Dugan, an engineering student at Central Maine State, shoots four people before turning the gun on himself, people in his social orbit ponder whether they overlooked warning signs. Luke Finch, who shared a class with him four years before, posts a Facebook remembrance of Nathan as a weird loner. When it goes viral, Nathan’s freshman composition professor, Maggie Daley, comes under scrutiny for overlooking a paper in which Nathan fetishized guns and hunting. Juska (The Blessings) explores the characters’ ensuing efforts to assign blame and their damaging impact on the lives of Maggie; her anxiety-prone daughter, Anna; Nathan’s mother; and others. The novel also expertly depicts the way in which, in the wake of a public tragedy, the echo chamber effect of the internet (including a harmful YouTube video) and social media easily convert speculation and supposition into damning “fact.” Although some of the peripheral characters only exist to serve the plot, Juska’s novel is moving and memorable in its portrayal of people unexpectedly involved in devastating events.

March 15, 2018
When Maggie, a dedicated English professor, hears a radio bulletin about a shooting in the nearby mall, it isn't long before she recognizes the shooter as one of her former students. When another former student posts online about the shooter's peculiar behavior in her classroom, Maggie finds herself at the center of the community's fury as her own feelings of guilt begin to undermine her neat and orderly life. The situation puts her daughter, already struggling with anxiety and eating disorders, on edge, just as she's leaving for college, and the student who authored the incriminating Facebook post finds his own anxiety level ballooning as well. Through the all-too-familiar terrain of this modern-day tragedy, Juska (The Blessings, 2014) explores the growing issue of anxiety among today's youth, asking readers to consider the ways in which our actions have increasingly far-reaching impact. Switching between viewpoints, Juska contrasts the actions of a split second and the slow burn of a lifetime of behavior to show that both can have extensive, damning consequences that are rarely foreseen.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)