How to Be Safe

February 1, 2018
A brilliant, tragically timely second novel from the author of The Young Widower's Handbook (2017).FORMER TEACHER HAD MOTIVE. When this chyron rolls across the bottom of a cable news segment, Anna Crawford becomes complicit in a high school shooting. Never mind that she had nothing to do with the crime; once she's part of the story, she's guilty of...something. This novel is an indictment of gun culture, hot-take journalism, and social media, and if that sounds like a miserable premise for a novel, fear not: McAllister is a brave and stylish writer, and Anna is a singular creation. At first, she seems like a classic unreliable narrator, but it quickly becomes hard to decide which is crazier: Anna or the world she's describing. As a one-time teacher and a thoroughgoing misfit--she was fired for being "unpredictable" just before the shooting--Anna is perfectly positioned to understand the shooter even as she recognizes that both his teen angst and his deadly rage are hackneyed. Once she achieves secondhand fame, she notes that the strangers who want to kill her, those who want to rape her, and those who want to do both--in that order--share the same fantasies of dominance. "In America," she says, "we send children to school to get shot and to learn algebra and physics and history and biology and literature. Less civilized nations don't have such an organized system for murdering their children. Mass murders in undeveloped countries occur because they are savages." Anna doesn't just worry about guns; she sees how misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and classism shape a society in which assault weapons are fetish objects. The horror is offset--or maybe thrown into sharp relief--by moments of mordant humor. When an evangelizing acquaintance tries to frighten Anna with images of darkness and demons and a final battle between good and evil, Anna says, "You might want to make this sound less exciting...I kind of want to not repent just so I can see the whole scene." Then she adds, "People don't want to be bored."Intensely smart. Sharply written.

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February 26, 2018
For a brief time in the relentless latest from McAllister (following The Young Widower’s Handbook), suspended high school English teacher Anna Crawford is named a person of interest in the police investigation of a mass shooting at her school. Her first-person narrative picks up in the aftermath of the tragedy. Anna was suspended before the shooting for an unspecified outburst in the classroom. After the shooting, which ends when the unnamed male shooter kills himself, broadcast journalists show her picture and identify her as a suspect. In the chaos following the tragedy, she is bombarded with threatening phone calls, her home is searched by the FBI, and friends betray her. Even after the shooter is identified as a student and it is proven that he had no accomplices, the damage done to Anna proves hard for her to move past. McAllister’s novel unfolds both as grim social commentary and a subtle exploration of the stages of grief. Anna, with some gallows humor, describes journalists swarming the young shooter’s house and analyzing him ad nauseam, the way she becomes a target for well-wishers seeking to save her, and the constant churning arguments of both gun control opponents and proponents. Though Anna’s voice is strong, the novel falters in its depiction of the tragedy’s fallout, often electing to skim the surface instead of going deep.

Starred review from March 15, 2018
Dozens are dead or wounded after a high-school shooting in Seldom Falls, Pennsylvania, and suspended-teacher Anna Crawford is an early suspect. Anna, the narrator, grew up in the town, knew almost all of the victims, and heard the gunshots from her home. Now news outlets are camped on her lawn, her few friends are selling stories about her or reaching out in less-than-genuine ways, and it turns out her suspension was a permanent dismissal. The story, still somewhat vague, behind Anna's firing and pictures of her unhappy childhood and adult difficulties emerge, along with brief bios of the victims and Anna's (or maybe the author's) funny-and-not directions, as the title suggests, to staying safe in America today. Though Anna, who readers will empathize with and root for, drinks and behaves erratically, this is no new Girl novel. As for the massacre itself, focus stays on the victims, and violence occurs mainly off the page. Combining a deep character study, prescient satire, and an unfortunately all-too-timely evisceration of U.S. gun culture, McAllister's (The Young Widower's Handbook, 2017) well-voiced and remarkably observed page-turner is in almost all ways an anti-thriller?itself a comment on the current, terrifying mundanity of similar events.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from March 1, 2018

This darkly humorous primal scream of a novel takes as its subject the madness of modern American life, with all manner of violence, misogyny, paranoia, and self-righteousness on full, seedy display. At the center is a mass shooting at a public school, which leaves young high school English teacher Anna Crawford devastated. Already on what she considers an unjust suspension, Anna is further implicated in the tragedy, and she spends the entire novel trying to understand what happened and searching in vain for a way to be "safe." McAllister (The Young Widower's Handbook) suggests that this may not be possible, given the Internet trolls, vigilante busybodies, and future mass murderers hiding anonymously and angrily among us. Remarkably, the author is able to find some humor in the situation. VERDICT A blistering, Swiftian portrait of a nation that has lost its moral center, this book is a compelling from start to finish. Enthusiastically recommended for fans of literary fiction, psychological drama, and dystopian fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 10/16/17.]--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2018

This darkly humorous primal scream of a novel takes as its subject the madness of modern American life, with all manner of violence, misogyny, paranoia, and self-righteousness on full, seedy display. At the center is a mass shooting at a public school, which leaves young high school English teacher Anna Crawford devastated. Already on what she considers an unjust suspension, Anna is further implicated in the tragedy, and she spends the entire novel trying to understand what happened and searching in vain for a way to be "safe." McAllister (The Young Widower's Handbook) suggests that this may not be possible, given the Internet trolls, vigilante busybodies, and future mass murderers hiding anonymously and angrily among us. Remarkably, the author is able to find some humor in the situation. VERDICT A blistering, Swiftian portrait of a nation that has lost its moral center, this book is a compelling from start to finish. Enthusiastically recommended for fans of literary fiction, psychological drama, and dystopian fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 10/16/17.]--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.