Why a Booktrail?
2000s: A young boy is traumatised following a school shooting
Only Child
What you need to know before your trail
We went to school that Tuesday like normal.
Not all of us came home . . .
Huddled in a cloakroom with his classmates and teacher, six-year-old Zach can hear shots ringing through the corridors of his school. A gunman has entered the building and, in a matter of minutes, will have taken nineteen lives.
In the aftermath of the shooting, the close knit community and its families are devastated. Everyone deals with the tragedy differently. Zach’s father absents himself; his mother pursues a quest for justice — while Zach retreats into his super-secret hideout and loses himself in a world of books and drawing.
Ultimately though, it is Zach who will show the adults in his life the way forward — as, sometimes, only a child can.
Travel Guide
A school somewhere in America
This book contains no real locations and when you realise the subject and themes of the book this is not surprising. However this is a very authentic and raw account of a school shooting as seen through the eyes of a young boy who loses his brother in the shooting.
The words are his, the opinions his and his now distorted view of the world, his. He sees and follows the example of the adults around him, he learns how to react and deal with his fear and he struggles to cope with something that not even adults can comprehend let alone a child
There have been several tragic school shootings in the USA. This could be an account of any one of them.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Only Child
Destination: America, USA Author/Guide: Rhiannon Navin Departure Time: 2000s
Back to ResultsWhere Next?
