VBT# Youth and Other Fictions - Jonathan Cook

Today's VBT# is author Jonathan Cook and his debut novel "Youth and Other Fictions". What drew me to doing this tour was that the story in his book features a school shooting and for some non-pyschotic, weird reason - I always find this topic quite intriguing . What drives the students to do it , the pyschology behind it and the aftermath effects on the students and the killer himself.

Synopsis : Youth and Other Fictions - Jonathan Cook - 2011

Jonathan Cook's debut novel looks at the horrors of a school shooting and its psychological effects on those involved. Told from two perspectives--one a student's and one a teacher's--the story reveals the inner concerns leading up to the moment when the world falls apart and the anxieties of coping with the broken pieces afterwards. The first part of the novel "Youth and Other Fictions" features the killer going on a rampage of his school and shooting the victims and is told from the student's POV about what drove him to commit the act and his feelings on it. The second half of the novel "Youth and Other Fictions" is told years later , when the Killer's best friend is now all grown up and is a teacher at the school. It has a moment of past, present and future tense to the story.

Fans of Jennifer Brown's The Hate List and Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes will enjoy Youth and Other Fictions by Jonathan Cook.

Author Guest Post : Jonathan Cook

A Statement of Purposelessness

                                                     We had no cell phones in those days.

We had no Twitter or Facebook or Blogspot.

AIM was slowly replacing ICQ as the instant messaging client of choice.

The only people who had even heard of Google were its founders and the family of field mice with whom they shared their offices.

We found out via the evening news: “School shooting in Colorado.”

“Oh, I see” was our response. We didn’t need to say more.

The faculty didn’t talk about it with us. The administration made no announcements. The local paper ran the story beneath the fold.

We stopped wearing black.

When Time ran its cover story, S picked through the map and timeline and figured out all the mistakes made by the killers. He said there were twenty-four.

D later asked why it hadn’t happened to us. S said it just had.

We took our final exams. We played ball in the summer. We came back. We graduated. We went to college. We graduated. We fell in love. We took jobs.

We found ourselves in subways and taxis and airplanes.

We watched the towers fall. We started a war. We killed a madman in the desert.

Why did I write about a school shooting? I no longer know. I doubt it matters, anyway, since the world is better now than it was then. We have Blogspot and Facebook and Twitter now.

We have cell phones now.