I think the main issue with this book is that it’s come too soon. The author clearly wanted to be the first to cover the ‘biggest’ (in terms of public outrage) school massacre, which has caused one of the biggest flaws – there just is not enough information around yet.
Look back to one of the first high school shootings – Columbine, which happened more than 10 years ago now and information id’s still filtering out and views/details are still changing (in fact one of the biggest sources of information for that case. the basement files is still many years away from release).
I think the author has done the best he can with just one year off time passed, bit it still feels very much like its a collection of stories that are already available (and not necessarily true) via many other sources.
This book has inadvertently opened up one other element to this story (although not covered in this book), that being that there is a growing discussion from many different corners that the whole shooting may be one big hoax. I am not going to comment on that though as I have not looked into it in any detail yet.
My biggest gripe though was when the author briefly covered some of the other school massacres, specifically Columbine where he states that the reason that event took place was because Eric & Dylan had there computer game access revoked by their parents – FALSE!!!
Overall I think the author is trying to re-create Dave Cullen’s book on Columbine, but he falls very short of the mark. This book is worth a read but don’t expect anything ground breaking.
Overall Rating – 3.5 / 5.0
