Believe

Wally Lamb is an author I enjoy reading. I read his first novel She's Come Undone way before it got popular and Oprah decided it was cool. I think it was the very blue cover that caught my attention some day in my teens when I was browsing our local Borders with my dad. The book was good. Long, intimidatingly long at the time, but good. Lamb's other novels have been on my list and I'm glad I finally got to listen to The Hour I First Believed.

The jacket description of this book does not do it justice at all. The jacket describes it as another Columbine novel, and yet it was so much more. The main character is a teacher at Columbine and his wife is the school nurse. His wife is there on that tragic day and he is not. The story takes the husband and wife couple through their marriage and the impact of these events on their lives. I have to say I found a few parts to be unrealistic (which if you haven't guessed by now is not a positive in my book) but overall you could really see most of this unfolding.

Columbine really affected me as it happened my freshman year of high school and changed our school lives for ever. It was sort of like Virginia Tech in that you could look at the students on the news and they looked no different than you and your friends at the time. That's really the only explanation I have for why these two shootings in particular affected me.

Back to the book though, Lamb takes the reader beyond Columbine and through the after math which also includes Hurricane Katrina. I found it interesting he choose to focus on that tragedy and not as much on 9/11. 9/11 is mentioned but just barely. This book is long too, it seems the author is not a fan of shortening his thoughts, but well worth reading.

Current Listen: A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire