How to Be Safe

by Tom McAllister

Former Teacher Had Motive. Recently suspended for a so-called outburst, high school English teacher Anna Crawford is stewing over the injustice at home when she is shocked to see herself named on television as a suspect in a shooting at the school where she works. Though she is quickly exonerated, and the actual teenage murderer identified, her life is nevertheless held up for relentless scrutiny and judgment as this quiet town descends into media mania. Gun sales skyrocket, victims are transformed into martyrs, and the rules of public mourning are ruthlessly enforced. Anna decides to wholeheartedly reject the culpability she’s somehow been assigned, and the rampant sexism that comes with it, both in person and online.

A piercing feminist howl written in trenchant prose, How to Be Safe is a compulsively readable, darkly funny exposé of the hypocrisy that ensues when illusions of peace are shattered.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Adult Fiction, Adult

240 pages, Hardcover

First published April 3, 2018

About the author

Tom McAllister is the author of the novels "How to Be Safe" and "The Young Widower's Handbook," as well as the memoir "Bury Me in My Jersey." He is the non-fiction editor of Barrelhouse magazine and the co-host of the weekly Book Fight! podcast. His shorter work has appeared in a number of places, including Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Collagist, Hobart, The Rumpus, and The Millions. He lives in New Jersey and is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Temple University.

Reviews

[Lit with Leigh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Found this book at Canadian Tj Maxx for $5 so said YOLO. I really struggled rating this.

Writing: unique/5 | Plot: missing in action/5 | Ending: maybe his free trial of microsoft word finished so he had to pretend it ended there/5

THE PLOT

Literally nonexistent. There was a school shooting, a fired teacher was accused then exonerated, and then said teacher rambled on a lot about guns and sexism.

MY OPINION

Originally I wrote: Imagine if you dropped acid right as you watched some YouTube clips about sandy hook and then decided to write a book about mass shootings in America while tripping. That's how I imagine this book was written.

but tbh this was more like: imagine if you went to Joshua Tree and ate a bunch of shrooms, watched a Sandy Hook doc and then decided the world needed to hear your (mostly banal) take on mass shootings and sexism.

I did enjoy some of the "insights" provided by our whackadoodle narrator, but a lot of it was like saying "the sky is blue." Because there was legit no plot, nor character development, it felt like I was reading a catalogue of NYT letters to the editor after tragic events.

I gave this 2 stars because this was the best take on feminism from a male author I've read recently and I appreciated the unique prose. It's not for everyone but at least it was different than closed caption or dear diary ass writing. There were also some funny parts. But the narrator was a mishmash of contrasting ideologies and beliefs, making it tough to understand them. I couldn't connect with this reconstructed barbie doll with a ken head and lego arms.

PROS AND CONS

Pros: unique prose, I enjoyed the prologue from the shooter's POV, some insightful commentary, sometimes funny, didn't come off too mansplain-y when tackling sexism

Cons: no plot, no character development (or identity tbh), banal points, rambling, sometimes made me feel like I was on a date with a guy who thinks liking records is a personality trait

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm sorta biased on this one.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another timely read taken right out of our news headlines, a school shooting and a teacher, Anna, who though she had nothing to do with the shooting, is said to have a motive. After that many don't care if she is guilty or not, she has been indicted by the news networks. This reads like everything we see on our news channels, the talking heads and their suppositions, the rerunning of footage, the thoughts about the shooter, etc. The victims are portrayed, could something they had done in their past lead to this? Anna gets emails from people wanting her dead, punished and other horrible things.

Anna herself is an unreliable narrator and maybe more. It is at one a warning and an indictment of the power of our gun culture, social media and journalists. The writing is very matter of fact, but shows an insight into the frenzy and attempts to make sense of these mass shootings. At first I was avidly turning the pages, there was a darkness but also an irony behind the words that I found interesting. After the half way point though I lost interest a bit, too much of the same tone, maybe just too much in general. This is a good book, definitely worth reading, there are important truths within.

ARC from Edelweiss.

[Rachel · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think this was supposed to be droll and ironic but I honestly just found it obnoxious. From the fact that every paragraph ends in some kind of pithy aphorism of the author's making, Tom McAllister clearly thinks he has something to say in this novel. Unfortunately that 'something' rarely amounted to anything more than "The idea of hiding underground for a few years until everything got better was appealing. That's why groundhogs looked so happy."

The central concept is a salient one and one that hits close to home - that you're never truly safe in a society with lax gun restrictions, and suffice to say that as an American living in 2018, gun control is something I feel extremely strongly about. But there is nothing worthwhile in this book that actively contributes to that conversation, this has nothing to offer aside from being topical. This reads as a 200-something page indictment of modern gun laws; no plot, no character development, no commentary that actually forces the reader to consider anything in a new light. No comedy that actually hits its mark, no hard-hitting moments to punctuate the tedium. I'm sure you all know by now that unlikable characters (unlikable female characters in particular) make for some of my all-time favorite protagonists, but it's like the character of Anna was constructed just to be as abhorrent as possible with no other goal in mind. I also found the constant commentary on womanhood to be incredibly disingenuous coming from a male author, when half of the statements rang false anyway. I'm just not sure why McAllister purports to have the authority to let us know that "Women can wound each other in ways men can never imagine."

Also, full disclosure here - I listened to the audiobook which is never my favorite format, and the narrator sounding like a telephone operator didn't help matters. But whatever the driving force behind my dislike was, I just found this to be a waste of time.

[Ron Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom McAllister’s "How to Be Safe" is as startling as the sonic crack of a bullet. The story’s volatile tone tears through the despair of our era’s devotion to guns. In the opening pages, a young man kills 19 people and wounds 45 at a Pennsylvania high school. McAllister, the nonfiction editor of Barrelhouse magazine, constructs this preface entirely from the breathless cliches of “the playbook of mass murder” we all know so well: “They will call him a loner and they will quote former teachers saying he was bright but shy and they never thought he’d be capable of something like this. They will say, Nobody ever suspected it could happen here.”

But the rest of the novel focuses on Anna Crawford, an English teacher recently suspended from her job for insubordination. In the chaotic hours immediately after the shooting, Anna is considered a. . . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...

[Lee Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some books emerge from the author's experience, some seem like they're in conversation with other books, but this one seems to have been formed by the author's experience of the internet, particularly Twitter, specifically how that fragmented social-media monster processes those wholly American unnatural disasters known as school shootings. Do not look to this book for solace or support if you're distraught about the intermittently occurring atrocities enabled by the NRA and right-winger, second-amendment luvin', pro-lifer hypocrites. If you are at all suicidal or homicidal, avoid this -- seriously, its vision of humanity could push you over the edge. If you're looking for a traditional, linear, straight-forward, made-for-TV novel sincerely relating a year's worth of speeches, tears, and memorials after a shooting, this isn't for you. But if you're fed-up after Parkland and Sandy Hook and Columbine and lesser-known shootings not on tip of tongue, if you find the inevitable "thoughts and prayers" from politicians on the NRA payroll insulting, and the call to arm teachers surreally stupid, and if you're comfortable or at least familiar with the fragmentation of online interactions, and find sarcasm "delicious," this one may be up your alley.

It's the author's third grief-related publication: first came a memoir about his obsessive Philadelphia Eagles fandom and his father's death (Bury Me in My Jersey: A Memoir of My Father, Football, and Philly), followed a few years later by The Young Widower's Handbook, a novel about you guessed it. The author is a friend from grad school and so I pretty much know for sure that he's not the Irish-American embodiment of sitting shiva, enshrouded like an Old Country widow, mourning everything all the time, at least not on the surface. Writers' characters can be expressed more through writing than their everyday appearance: Tom's expression of self through the pages of his first three books is unanimously aggrieved. Off the page, he's certainly not shy about airing his grievances in general, which you can experience if you listen to his podcast about books with Mike Ingram, Book Fight, or just skim his Twitter. But this is something more than just a grief novel.

It's an unconventionally structured, sarcastic, topical novel with some low-key surrealist elements. Although it's very much anti-gun, it presents a vision of humanity that seems better off dead, maybe even worth killing off its young with semi-automatic machine guns en masse? Other than Calvin, recovered opioid addict brother of the central protagonist Anna, really not a single character is on the benevolent, let alone kind, side of the continuum. This often feels like a sort of dystopian novel where the evil that destroyed civilization existed in the land and its people well before school shootings began to occur with the unpredictable regularity of tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, treated like acts of God (you can't legislate the wind and rain out of existence, y'know). This is a loveless world, where ghosts can be seen and the spirit in general is mean. The CNN reporter checking-in a while later is really only intent on giving the story some “uplift.” The church-goers trying to save Anna's soul are gun-happy wackos. There’s repeated foreshadowing of something to do with birds, those fine-feathered symbols of peace and transcendence, but in the end Anna doesn't rise above it all — she just sorta takes flight/flees.

The author deserves kudos for avoiding the expected gesture in the direction of a semblance of a happy ending and also for elegantly subverting the tenets of internet-brand feminism (or maybe it's just a reflection of its appearance online). Narrated by a woman who once worked at a phone-sex call center and was thrown down the stairs by a former boyfriend, the novel seemed to me to slyly critique/reflect the sort of feminism that reduces all men to dicks, single-minded sex obsessives essentially intent on explaining the definition of mansplaining to women, every urethra winking at defenseless women, victims in advance if not already, reduced to what they think men think they're only good for (having boobies, babies, sex, etc).

After a prologue from the POV of the shooter, it alternates between sections titled by month beginning with the shooting in April, descriptions of the victims (more like little stories than the cold rundowns in the part about the women in 2666), and absurdist handbook-like suggestions on how to be safe, all of these delivered in short asterisk-separated bursts, ideal for internet-busted attention spans -- the structure emphasizes that this is a work of fiction, the characters for the most part seemed to me like rural lower-middle-class cartoons, their histories of hardships exaggerated beyond belief, the ugliness and tragedy experienced elevated in quantity and intensity until it achieves the level of art, something beyond simple credulity, same way the sun has fallen into the lake and been extinguished in a 30-mile area surrounding the town only, how Anna and Calvin can see ghosts thanks to their father's shotgun-assisted suicide one fine Easter evening, plus there's a goshdarn militia, etc.

Again, it's essential to the "enjoyment" of this one not to approach it with sincere expectations, looking for a beautiful, moving, realist fictionalization of hard times in Trump Country (urban gun violence among black student-aged kids outside of the classroom occurs off-screen). The cover -- aptly showing an exploded, semi-pixelated rose (my review of his last book starts by saying I rarely read books with roses on their covers, but doubling down on the rose motif for this one really paid off!)-- is the most beautiful part of the book. But it's not about beauty or love or kindness or courage or endurance or any of those old verities on the positive side of the spectrum. It's about ugliness and anger and generalized meanspiritedness ("When you say something cruel, your brain releases a surge of dopamine to soothe you, and then your body starts to crave the dopamine so you can become progressively meaner just to get your fix"). It's about the number of pints of blood it takes to fill a bathtub and therefore the number of people required to die and bleed out to literally live up to the term "bloodbath." It's about the joke about the gun that walks into a bar and when asked if it's new in town shoots the bartender in the face because it's a gun. It's about fragmented society and fragmented consciousness, the realism of so-called real life reduced to its emanation online. It's not quite a traditional satire -- as an argument for gun control it muddies the straight-up satirical waters with dirty realism, surrealism, tongue-in-cheek sincerity. It seems to me like it's essentially a critical essay in the form of a novel that holds a fractured mirror up to the timelines for @AMarchForOurLives, #GunControl, #Parkland, and shit like @NRATV, which is certainly something new. Like Matthew McIntosh's supremely unconventional, untopical TheMystery.doc, this one's structure and sense seem to capture something about the spirit of the times, although this one's more specifically taking on the meaner side of the zeitgeist.

Just donated $25 (the approximate price of the hardcover) to March for Our Lives -- it struck me while reading this that I hadn't donated to support those taking action against the NRA. Somehow, even though it primarily represents the bad and the ugly, this novel comes off in the end as a force for good.

(Nice work, Tom!)

[Kelli · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve been in a book slump...so much so that I read only one (stellar) book last month and decided to take a reading break.
Let me just say this: I’m on vacation. This book may well be brilliant, and it is certainly timely, but I do not like satire. Ever. And definitely not while the sun is shining. Too dark & satire-y for me. 2 stars

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to this in audio because of its inclusion on the Tournament of Books longlist. I am an avid listener of the author's podcast, Book Fight, but had not read his books. I will go back and read his previous novel now!

Anna is a professor who is mistakenly accused of a mass shooting and this sends her down a path riddled by PTSD, invasive media, and gun-hoarding end-times cults. Anna is incredibly unlikeable and she doesn't seem to understand how to move through life. It was unclear to me as a reader how much to blame on her experience of getting fired, not realizing she was fired, being accused of this horrible massacre - vs. her somewhat unusual childhood that she is a bit detached from.

What she would prefer to understand is how to be safe. Can anybody be safe if our answers involve guns? The novel asks this question and more, but in a pithy way.

I feel like the work the author did on the structure of the novel saves it from being too preachy, too focused inside Anna's head, even over the top with the satire. His restraint is to the novel's benefit, just long enough.

[Jerrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a satirical critique of the current gun and social media culture. What freedoms are we willing to give up to ensure our safety or get a popular online presence? While I thought the concept was great, I wasn’t overly impressed with the execution-this read like a long monologue about gun violence and the ridiculous lengths people go to on social media. There were some strange magical realism elements mixed in, but overall the point is well-made that the freedom to own guns leads to us giving up other freedoms in turn. For the audiobook, I didn’t like the narrator. 2.5⭐️ rounded up.

[Alison Hardtmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

How To Be Safe by Tom McAllister is told from the point of view of a high school English teacher, a woman who was not at the school the day the shooting happened. With the murderer dead, there's a search for possible accomplices and Anna is briefly investigated by the FBI and hounded by the media.

As time moves on, Anna looks around at how the shooting has changed the town for good, and how easily these school shootings, and all the mass shootings, are quickly moved past, a few more guns are sold, a monument commissioned, a few more cameras installed to keep watch. But Anna is not moving on. She is consumed with how to be safe, when there are so many dangers out there.

On the highway, you can run into more dangers than you've ever imagined. Not just distracted drivers but stalkers, sex traffickers, teens throwing rocks through windshields from the overpass. If you pass enough cars, you will have passed at least one murderer; that's just statistics.

This novel is narrated by Anna, who spends a lot of her time thinking about what is dangerous. Now out of a job, she spends her day not interacting with her former friends, or spending time with her brother, although she finds that no matter how badly she wants to stay safe, people keep intruding into her life, and she can't stop herself from going outside and interacting with the other people living in the dangerous world.

"The world is not out to get you."

"I never said it was." Though I thought: What if it is?

"Your paranoia makes you not even human. It just makes you this jagged shard of fear that can't do anything."

I turned off the TV and stood. If he wanted to do things, then we would do things. I put on a jacket and some shoes and told him to follow me. If we got killed, it would be on him.

How To Be Safe is very much a commentary on how we have chosen to live in the US today, and how that affects our communities. But despite the subject matter, this book isn't bleak; Anna is too full of fight for that, and McAllister writes with a detached humor that suits this novel very well.

[Jessica Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This sharp, dry satire about the aftermath of a school shooting says so much about contemporary America—from our disturbing gun culture to toxic masculinity to the increasing reality of never feeling safe. It’s not happy, optimistic or redemptive, but neither is our current reality. It’ll resonate with anyone who is fed up with gun violence and the meaningless thoughts and prayers that follow.

The plot centers around Anna, a teacher at the school, who is briefly suspected of the shooting. It follows her, and the quiet rural town in which she lives, through the year following the tragedy.

I had to keep reminding myself that this was written by a man—a testament to McAllister’s success writing a female character and creating a novel with such prominent feminist undertones. (Mass shootings are, after all, a uniquely male problem, so the perspective of this female character is a smart choice.)

Anna is such a fascinating narrator. She’s wry and darkly funny, understandably disaffected by the absurdity of her life. Following the shooting, the town turns to increasingly preposterous solutions to the tragedy: increased surveillance, students signing pledges vowing to defend their peers against attackers, an armed task force called (hilariously) “the War on Violence.” Anything, anything, but addressing the root of the problems: guns. Anna is blasé as this all happens around her, as if it were inevitable.

There’s a subtle surreal and dystopian vibe to this book, almost like The Leftovers, yet it feels firmly rooted in our current reality. It’s not easy to write a book about something so solemn and topical as school shootings, but McAllister does so with such a unique voice and deft critique that it feels meaningful—not in spite of its cynicism and nihilism, but because of it.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

McAllister pulls us right into his dark story as we follow a school shooter in the moments before he kills. He has time to eat pizza before it is fourth period, lunch time, at the safe high school in the former friendliest town in America. After the shooting, people will study his journals, his music, and his web browsing history. The coroner will do an autopsy. They’ll find nothing. These things “will not show the way people can be ruined just by existing in the world. Shell-shocked acquaintances will say…he had so much to live for, ignorant of the fact that the prospect of having to live like this for another fifty years was not the solution to but rather the cause of his hopelessness.”

The story unfolds in short scenes set in 13 chapters beginning in April, the month of the shooting, and ending in April at the one-year anniversary of the shooting. There are three chapters on “The Victims” and three chapters on “How to be Safe.” The writing is concise, flows well, and time jumps are executed flawlessly.

How to be Safe is told from the point of view of one of the teachers who wasn’t at school the day of the shooting. She thought she had been suspended but learned from TV that she had been fired, thereby giving her motive for the killing in the eyes of the press.

McAllister barely crosses the line into satire through his depiction of the town’s reaction to the school shooting. At one point, a SWAT team is deployed when a dark-skinned man passes through town, even though the school shooter was white. The reactions are exaggerated and even comical. Deploying the militia to the town and other measures seem ridiculous, but I couldn’t help feeling like this could really happen. Just today, at Santa Fe High School in Texas, there was another school shooting.

I felt I was looking at the political machinery behind a school shooting. How the press analyzes the shooter trying to determine a profile. How the press makes some victims stars and ignores others. How the government refuses to openly politicize the shooting thereby politicizing it by refusing to criticize their donors, the NRA. How individual citizens become fearful and buy guns, and more guns, and more guns.

But this is also the story of how the falsely-accused teacher Anna tries to feel safe in her life again. She explores her relationships with her family and friends, and eventually her relationship to the town. She vents in a very #MeToo sort of way, occasionally blaming men for her fearfulness. The way she does it had me laughing out loud, literally. Did the sun really fall into the lake at the time of the murder or is Anna just depressed? Even the way she deals with her fearfulness in the end made me laugh. It's a kind of poetic justice.

How to be Safe is a relevant book in light of all the school shootings in this country. While some of the government’s reactions seem ridiculous, and some of the methods to stay safe are outright hilarious, in this political climate, the book gives us plenty to worry about. It’s worth a read.

[Patrick Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fiction is not generally known for its immediate timeliness. Novels take a while to write, so you end up with a round of novels about Vietnam in 2010, etc. But this book feels like it was written in a flash over the last few weeks. It wasn't, I'm sure, but it feels that way because its two central themes -- gun violence and sexual harassment -- have been and continue to be as central to the American zeitgeist as water is to the ocean.

Anyway, I tore through this book in just a few days, and found the voice and mood very compelling. I especially loved the "Victim" sections, which reminded me, weirdly, of The Throwback Special (one of my favorite books of the past few years). Highly recommended.

(There was another high-profile school shooting while I was drafting this review. Jesus Christ.)

[Jennifer Tam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting and provoking read that I couldn't put down

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing is really strong and interesting in this short novel, but the mixture of tones and genres was too distracting to ignore. One scene will be serious, realistic, and poignant, and then it will be followed by a satirical scene full of fantasy and dark humor. I was never quite sure if I was supposed to be taking the plight of the main character seriously or not, and that kept taking me out of the story.

[Denver Public Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this title at a library conference after hearing the author speak, which notably was shortly after the Parkland high school shootings. This book takes place in the aftermath of a school shooting and hit close to home. A teacher is suddenly thrust into the media spotlight when it is suspected that she was the shooter; the suspicion is short-lived, though the impact is long-lasting. McAllister has a sure hold on our society's views on guns, bullying and sexism. He nails our fears and insecurities, and demonstrates this with terrifying interactions in regards to harassment. Everything is questioned - our devotion to guns, how we interpret violence, the burden of the victim and the shade thrown by observers. So much of what I read has actually happened. This book may bring controversy, but it is a needed conversation.

Get How to Be Safe from the Denver Public Library

- Dodie

[Mrs C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful observations set against a too-typical event nowadays. Anna is a brief suspect in a school shooting and from her POV she ruminates on being safe in this day and age - she also explores her choices and relationships with well-meaning folks around her.

Access to review copy provided by publisher.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Got an ARC. Thanks Norton!

I've read a couple of novels about school shootings so I wasn't sure I wanted another but it gave a new perspective. From a woman who was originally a suspect and suffering from depression and alcoholism. She is such a flawed protagonist but is hyper-aware of the town's reaction to the tragedy and is not immune to also giving into fear.

Beautifully written! Will watch Tom McAllister!

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

[Chlo (Taylor's Version) · Rating 1 out of 5]

A tree died for this

[Brandi D'Angelo · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging story, especially in light of all the school shootings. Told from the viewpoint of a suspended teacher (an odd choice, but like much of the book, it oddly works,) the book begins with the thoughts and actions of a boy on the way to commit a school shooting. It covers the array of victims, the teacher’s thoughts, and addresses how the community goes on living. The format is choppy, with lots of side rants on unrelated topics like confession booths, psychics, sex trafficking, pet stores and life on the moon. But somehow, it works.

The author’s descriptions are wonderful. Here is one that struck me, “Arms of flame leaped out of the pile as if trying to grab the nearest bystander. I kept getting closer. I wanted to sweat. I wanted to break the fever of the past few months. I stood so close to the fire I felt like I was inside it. The fire was the first thing I’d felt in weeks that wasn’t false. It was real and simple and it could have killed me if an officer hadn’t shoved me backward.”

There is a scene in the book where the community turns the shooter’s house into a museum of sorts, and when the main character goes for a visit, the guide takes her back to the boy’s room. There in the closet are bottles of liquor, and together, they take swigs from a bottle of vodka. Again, an odd scene, but somehow it was believable and real in my mind. After she takes the sip, the story goes on… “I felt the boy then in my blood. I felt him working through my veins. I took another sip. The boy was taking up residence in my body, so that I could feel how alone and terrified and violated he’d felt. For a moment I was an archangel on a path of divine vengeance and all I wanted was to see something burn.” Wow.

It just struck me that the main character of this book is possibly meant to be a possible mass-murderer herself, being that she is disgruntled and feeling pain, anger and sadness, just like the shooter. As the author writes about her experience of the school shooting, he is in effect, showing us these complicated emotions and how they manifest in one’s life. Fortunately for the main character, she had some people that cared about her and checked in on her; something we all need. It’s a very intellectual, mind-provoking read. I really enjoyed it.

[Sonya · Rating 5 out of 5]

With writing that is reminiscent of Don DeLillo and AM Holmes and maybe a touch of Tom Perotta, this novel encapsulates our current culture and its violence and dread. The main character is a depressed and terrified woman and the novel shows her inner thoughts about being a woman in a world that doesn't know how to accept women as human, about the proliferation of guns and shootings and meaningless memorials to the dead, about the futility of institutions to ward off the worst of our inclinations. I can't say to every person I know Hey, you should read this novel. It won't appeal to most readers, and it's triggering and bleak. But it is representative our world. This is us.

[Kara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book takes place in the aftermath of a school shooting and hits so close to home. Tom has his fingers on the vein of society, maybe even deeper than that. All I know is as a woman in this culture of ours he nailed my fears, my insecurities, and some of the most terrifying interactions I have experienced in regards to harassment. On top of that our devotion to guns; how we interpret violence. So much of what I read has actually happened. This book may bring controversy, but its a needed one that lays all our sins to bare.

[Nadine in California · Rating 4 out of 5]

This satire is a primal scream over the US failure to enact even the most basic national gun control laws. The slow-motion scream comes from the mouth of a cynical, funny, abrasive, loopy, and massively depressed woman named Anna Crawford. She reminded me of the title character in Stephen Florida. My copy of the book is bristling with sticky notes marking so many moments of deadpan humor. Sample: the name of her small Pennsylvania town is “Seldom Falls” – part Norman Rockwell, part vaudeville punchline.

[Beth Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

How to Be Safe begins with a school shooting.

At first, it seems that that is where the book will go. It will be a plot-driven look at the shooter, the victims, and the events of the shooting. But instead, we follow Anna, a teacher who was recently fired.

Anna is quickly cleared of wrongdoing, but there is still plenty wrong in her life.

Meanwhile, the town collectively loses their cool over the school shooting. Mob mentality takes precedence as people find more and more outlandish solutions to the gun problem.

How to Be Safe becomes a character study of Anna and also of the collective fear among the community. Common sense loses out in the face of red tape, politics, and hysteria.

It's an interesting book that I actually had to read twice to fully understand. The first time, I was a bit lost, trying to figure out what exactly the story was. The second time, I appreciated the story of Anna. It became a lot more poignant, her back story,. She wasn't the purely unlivable character any more.

Instead, she was a person on a bad path who didn't quite know how to right it.


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[frumpburger · Rating 4 out of 5]

When a school shooting rocks a safe small Midwestern town, suspended high school teacher Anna Crawford is temporarily a suspect. What follows on the pages of this novel is Anna both unraveling and contemplating the concept of safety in our modern age. Unfortunately timely given the events of the last week, this book also deals head on--but artfully--with issues of gun control, mental health, sexism, and the phenomenon of entitled, angry boys committing unspeakable violence. With a deeply flawed protagonist whose actions at times make it difficult to really have her back,McAllister's second novel proves that he's a skilled writer, and this novel has immense depth and grapples with an all too common occurrence with compassion. Read it. Unless you don't like creative, well-written novels. Then maybe don't.

[Gwendolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love first-person narrators who are quirky, unreliable, and perhaps even mentally ill. Anna Crawford is just such a narrator. She’s a high school English teacher who is suspended from her job just prior to a deadly school shooting event. She is immediately identified as a suspect but only very briefly since the actual shooter (a current student) is quickly found. All this happens in the first few pages of the book, and the rest of the novel moves forward from there. The real substance of the book is the impact this tragic shooting has on Anna’s psyche and the entire town. Because we get the story through Anna’s eyes, we’re never entirely sure what’s true and what’s just a product of Anna’s overactive imagination. Anna’s voice is bold and funny, and she stumbles into some fresh insights (particularly around how men treat women), and that’s what kept me reading to the end despite the fact that nothing much happens after the initial dramatic shooting.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny, wise, imaginative, and fierce. Anna Crawford is a character I'll remember for a long time: a worldly, bitter, savvy sense of humor floating on top of an ocean of empathy and pain and longing.

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't get into this book, no matter how many times I tried. The protagonist/narrator was dull, and a lot of the book came off as preaching instead of narrating and explaining different point of views through characterization.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow wow wow wow wow