Hate List is a heartbreakingly beautiful novel by first time author Jennifer Brown. The novel picks up five months after a tragic school shooting in a small suburban town. Valerie has spent the last five months trying to get over the guilt she feels after the shooting. She and her boyfriend Nick spent countless afternoons putting people on their "hate list," a notebook that the police found after Nick went on a shooting spree in his school, killing students, teachers, and then himself. Even though she never pulled a trigger many people in her community blame her for what happened, including herself.
I started reading this book thinking, how could anyone possibly cope with this? It was an impossible task, handled well by the author. There are no easy answers when you are faced with a tragedy like this and Brown didn't try to give you one. My only compliant was that Valerie's parents seemed a little too awful, especially her father, blaming her for getting between him and his mistress with the shooting. But you know, sometimes people can be just awful.
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