Give a Boy a Gun #1

After a long day of reading, I finished my book. I read Give a Boy a Gun by Todd Strasser. It is a very dark book as you may have been able to tell by the title. The book is about two young men named Gary Searle and Brandon Lawlor. The two high school students are constantly bullied by their classmates. It is a very interesting book, because it is not narrated, it is told through a series of interviews. Most of the harassment is from the football players. The first part of the book is a part of Gary's suicide note. He explains to his mother that it isn't her fault and there was nothing she could have done about it. After the little snippet of his note, it goes into some background about Gary during his childhood. We find out his parents went through a rough divorce and lives with his mother. Brandon moves to the same town as Gary in seventh grade and the two become close friends. The book moves on sharing information about the two friends throughout middle school. They were quiet kids and known as outcasts in their school. In one of the interviews, a girl that had an on and off relationship with Gary and was friends with Brendan said, "When I got back it was different. I can't exactly explain how, but I felt it. There was something dark in Brendan. I don't know where it came from. Whether it had always been inside him, or whether it just started to grow because of the way people treated him in school." The book has an extremely dark tone to it. It made me uncomfortable just about the whole time I was reading it, but I guess that means the author did his job. The author wanted people to feel sorrow for these kids. Bullying is a huge problem, and even though this is a fictional story, it seems all too real.