Quad (review)

On Monday, April 6, the high-school quad becomes the scene of chaos as shots ring out and panicked students stampede for cover. Scenes of past happenings intercut with the events of the present to provide a window into the seething enmities between the school groups (each chapter is introduced with a clique name such as "Drama Queens," "Jocks," or "Techies," indicating the subject group) and to provide clues—and red herrings—as to the identity of the shooter. The contrived and awkward style keeps this from being successful even as a shallow high-action story; characterization goes beyond reductive to dismissive, with most of the cast interchangeable in their unsympathetic and spiteful wrongdoing and differentiated only by variance of stereotype. Acceptance of superficial causality—apparently anyone who's the victim of taunting becomes murderous—means that the revelation of the actual shooter lacks impact, since a multitude of students were apparently preparing their own bloodthirsty revenge anyway. This isn't exactly an undertreated subject in literature these days, and readers with an interest will be much better served by Walter Dean Myers' Shooter (BCCB 6/04), Adam Meyer's The Last Domino (BCCB 6/05), or Todd Strasser's Give a Boy a Gun (BCCB 10/00).