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Review and Giveaway | Crash and Burn, Michael Hassan

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CrashandBurn-Cover

Michael Hassan’s young adult novel Crash and Burn presents a unique perspective on the subject of school shootings. Rather than delve into the psyche of the shooter, Hassan focuses on the hero, Steven “Crash” Crashinsky, who has somehow managed to talk his classmate David “Burn” Burnett out of killing anyone when he took the school hostage. Crash becomes a local hero and media darling with a book deal — no one knows exactly how Crash convinced Burn to surrender, nor does anyone know exactly what Burn whispered to Crash before he did.

The mystery of Burn’s last words before surrendering forms the core of the rest of the story and propels it forward. Given that, Hassan makes the interesting decision not to make the hostage taking the focus of his story — it provides the catalyst for the story, certainly, and we are constantly aware of it having happened, but the story is really about Crash, a socially awkward young boy with ADHD who relates most with video game character Crash Bandicoot and who has a major crush on Burn’s wise cracking yet deeply troubled older sister Roxanne.

One of the major questions in any school shooting story is: what finally pushes the shooter over the edge? In Hassan’s story, it’s Crash’s family problems we are privy to — his domineering, almost cruel, father forms a shadow that haunts Crash for most of his life. Seeing Crash’s own troubles creates an interesting parallel between the two boys, and leaves the question hanging: what makes one boy a villain and the other a hero?

Even as a hero, Crash is hardly a saint. He uses his fame to pick up much younger girls, he treats the girl he loves pretty horribly, he is more interested in smoking pot than in actually doing anything. His book deal forces him to deal with memories of Burn, but he still often needs his agent or his friends to prod him into it. Dealing with a boy like Burn, and seeing him snap to the point of taking the entire school hostage — that’s a lot to deal with, and the image of Crash is not so much that of a hero as that of a young boy who has been forced to deal with an experience much bigger than himself, and the aftermath of that.

Crash and Burn is a gripping exploration of growing up with an unescapable source of fear. One question people usually ask after a school shooting incident is whether or not there were any warning signs, whether or not it could have been prevented. In Hassan’s book, Burn was clearly disturbed from the beginning. He almost blew up the school in elementary school, he was institutionalized time and again, and put on medication — and still, for some reason or another, he always ended up back in the public school system, free to take the school hostage. How could that happen? Hassan offers no easy answers, nor does he assign blame — teachers, administrators, even Burn’s mother all seem to be doing what they can, and yet due to one circumstance or another, it wasn’t enough.

Crash’s relationship with Burn is similar to Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort — their destinies are inextricably intertwined. Despite Crash’s attempts to keep Burn out of his life, they always manage to end up connected anyway, often because of the simple fact that their mothers are friends. The sensation then is of inevitability — like Crash, we know Burn is disturbed, and like Crash, we know at some point Burn will snap. Due to the sequence of events in the book, we even know how he will snap. And yet like Crash, we can’t seem to look away. Burn is a menacing presence throughout the book, even when he isn’t physically present in the scene.

It’s tragic, seeing Crash try to live his own life, seeing him already having to deal with a horrible father, seeing him try for happiness with his friendship with Roxane — and then seeing how no matter what, Burn happens to be by his side. More than tragic however, it’s also chilling, because unlike Harry Potter/Voldemort, Crash and Burn’s story is very much set in the real world. There are boys like Burn out there, and they may just be in your local school system.

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GIVEAWAY

Harper Collins has kindly offered two of my readers copies of Crash and Burn by Michael Hassan. Enter to win here: a Rafflecopter giveaway. (US and Canada only)

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Thank you to Harper Collins for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | Smile at Strangers, Susan Schorn

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I remember the first time I tried karate. I have never been athletic, and admittedly, one of the appeals of karate class was the rather low-key way the teacher introduced me to the drills. I may not be able to do a jumping, spinning, flying back kick, but even unathletic, uncoordinated me is still perfectly capable of forming a fist and throwing a punch. And the kiai? I thought I could at least mask the wobbliness of my kicks with a karate yell loud enough to rattle windows.

Here’s the thing about karate: you stick at it long enough, you work at it hard enough, and you eventually realize that your body is actually beginning to change. And I don’t mean just getting fitter. Your moves actually get sharper — and more importantly, you’re aware of just how sharp they are and just how much sharper they ought to be. You become in tune with your body, aware of the slightest movements and aware of the slightest shifts in balance. There’s a line in Susan Schorn’s Smile at Strangers where she talks about a black belt’s unconscious grace. I don’t think I ever quite achieved that grace (alas, my natural klutziness has no cure), but I did have a taste of what she meant. And even now, when I see karateka perform, I marvel at the fluidity of movement, the sharpness of force, as beautiful as it can be deadly.

9780547774336Susan Schorn’s Smile at Strangers is a personal memoir of her life in karate. More than just a retelling of stories however, she organizes her book into kowa, Zen proverbs. Fall down seven times, get up eight. If you want to feel safe, be prepared to feel uncomfortable. You’re doing it all wrong, and that’s perfect. The best part about karate isn’t the physicality, but rather the mental preparedness the training instills. Schorn writes about her experiences in the dojo, but primarily to support what she has learned for life outside karate.

In the beginning of the book, Schorn wonders about the math behind “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” If you fall down only seven times, how can you be down an eighth in order to get up again? She eventually interprets it as an added emphasis on defiance. No matter what crap life throws at her, she is going to leap up fighting — and leap up fighting one extra time just for good measure. Later on, however, something happens that makes her realize that, while she was prepared for a battle in her own backyard, the real danger happened elsewhere, far beyond her control, and she was left to wonder what, exactly, she was readying herself to battle for.

As Schorn writes about her karate journey, and how karate classes have helped her deal with personal challenges, we see her progression, from a frightened, outwardly defiant person to a calmer, more confident one much more useful for battle. This isn’t to say that karate transformed her completely — as with my natural klutziness, Schorn still cannot escape certain fears and insecurities. But she does learn a lot, and she takes us on this journey with her.

I read this book from the perspective of someone who has learned quite a bit about karate. So when Schorn writes about how karate has better equipped her to deal with life, I completely understood. Her karate experience differed greatly from mine — she studied Kyokushin (a close fighting, full contact style) and at a women’s only dojo with a focus on self-defence. I started with Shotokan (long-range, point sparring), which is probably the furthest from Kyokushin stylistically, and even though I eventually ended up with a more mid-range style, it was still very different from Kyokushin. So I loved reading about her school’s approach to teaching karate.

Will this book resonate as much with someone who has never studied karate? I don’t know. But there is an especially striking scene that I think most of us, even non-karateka, can relate to. As part of their self-defence training, Schorn and her classmates were paired off, and one had to make a series of requests while the other could only say “No.”

“No,” I told her. “No. No. No. No. No. No.”

This would have been boring if the embarrassment weren’t so agonizing. “I hate this,” I thought; “I hate it so much I can feel it physically.” The sensation of saying “no” to another person’s face made me writhe internally, and it took all my energy not to squirm…

It occurred to me, somewhere around my twentieth “no,” that I had probably said the word more times in the preceding half-minute than I had in the preceding month. I thought back over all the times I could have said “no” and didn’t…

Repeated over and over, without explanation, without placating gestures, without apology, it formed an unassailable verbal wall made of just one brick, one tiny word: no. [pp 15 – 16]

How often have you wanted to say no but then acquiesced to be polite? We’re ingrained to want to please people, and there are people who take advantage. The mere training then, of developing the confidence to say “no,” is something I think many of us will find useful. And you don’t need a black belt to learn it.

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Thank you to Thomas Allen Ltd for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | Paris, Edward Rutherfurd

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coverEdward Rutherfurd is best known for his sweeping intergenerational epics. At 832 pages, his latest novel Paris certainly requires the character list and family tree at the beginning to help the reader keep the names straight. The story shifts as well among time periods — we move from the building of the Eiffel Tower to a revolutionary group years later then to a point earlier in Paris history and back again. Rutherfurd’s story is sweeping and historical, a grand narrative about a city as seen through the eyes of its characters.
The power of Rutherfurd’s storytelling, however, lies not in the grandness of its scope but rather in the personal nature of its moments. When I met Rutherfurd at a Random House Canada blogger event, he gave us a brief teaser to the novel that reminded me of a soap opera. From my recap of the event:

A woman falls in love with a Frenchman, except circumstances force them apart, so she settles for an Englishman (“always a poor second,” he quipped). Then years later, she returns to Paris and sees the Frenchman again at a party, except while she has aged, he has not, and of course, it turns out, that’s the Frenchman’s son, who happens to be a friend of Hemingway. (“Sorry,” he said. “You know I have to put things like that in.”) She falls in love with this young man, but her daughter does as well. (Original Post)

That description intrigued me — I expected to feel bad for the daughter, as well as for the Frenchman’s son, who after all might have had a fairly peaceful romance if not for the mother’s clinging on to her past. And indeed when this part of the story came up in Paris, I remembered Rutherfurd’s speech and my prediction. I did feel bad for the parties involved, I was also relieved that Hemingway’s part turned out to be more peripheral than I feared (some authors can’t resist the temptation to reference historical figures liberally).

More than anything however, I was surprised at how small a part this thread is in the overall story. Prior to the intergenerational love triangle, and at times interspersed with these scenes, I’ve read the mother’s own story of lost love. That actually turned out to be my favourite subplot in the entire novel — I was so caught up in the story I almost forgot her romance was doomed to fail, or more likely, I wanted to believe I could somehow change what Rutherfurd had written. I wanted her romance with the Frenchman to succeed. The story of a young girl falling in love with a more sophisticated man who saw her only as a child is such a classic trope, and I love the delicate touch with which Rutherfurd treated this storyline.

It’s easy for subplots to get lost in such a sweeping epic, and certainly, some of them barely interested me at all. At the same time, however, the subplots that do catch each reader’s eye stand out all the more for it. Rutherfurd’s story of Paris reads like a carefully curated history — bits of personal stories the author chooses from countless others and stitches together. It’s a work of fiction, but intertwined with so much historical detail that it feels like part of history. And just like Rutherfurd chooses which figures to focus on, so do we readers get to choose which plot threads strike a chord within us. Rutherfurd may be writing his personal history of Paris, but we in turn get to read our own personal version of his history.

Paris is a book in which to lose oneself. As with any historical epic, some coincidences stretch credibility, but Rutherfurd’s writing nevertheless pulls you in. From romance and relationships to revenge and revolution, Rutherfurd’s Paris is a beautifully crafted intergenerational, multi-family epic. With so many characters and so many plot threads, it’s hard to imagine this book feeling intimate. And yet Rutherfurd’s skill makes it so.

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Thank you to Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.