Give a Boy a Gun

Give a Boy a Gun. Todd Strasser. New York: Simon Pulse, 2002. 208 pp.
Gary Searle and Brendan Lawlor are both high school sophomores and they have had enough. Day after day for more than two years, they have been beaten up, harassed and cursed out by most of the jocks at Middleton High, especially by Sam Flach, a football player. One night they are armed with guns that they have stolen from a neighbor’s collection. Gary and Brendan storm a school dance, booby trap all of the doors with homemade bombs that they had made, and prepare to turn their high school upside down with a violent show of force. When it is all over, one of the boys is still alive but in a coma due to almost being beaten to death by the other students who tried to disarm him so he couldn’t harm any one else. The other boy kills himself, and the football player Sam Flach is alive but, with any hope, has no hope for a future football career.
GIVE A BOY A GUN consists of short, related statements from students, parents, school administrators, and the two boys who did all of this. The story attempts to give a voice to the countless sides of school violence and can be disturbing at times. It is also an articulated, well-rounded cross section of many viewpoints on gun control, bullying and the high school social disorder. This is a good book with many different viewpoints of different people who knew or experienced this tragic time. I recommend this book for a young adult audience. I would rank this book a ten on a scale one to ten.
Reviewed by: Christina M.