HOW WE RICOCHET

A random shooting changes the trajectories of three women’s lives in this contemporary novel set in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Betty is a recent high school graduate from a working-class family who is engaged in an unpaid internship. One day, she, her mom, and her older sister, Joy, make an uncharacteristic stop at the mall and encounter the most harrowing experience of their lives. Betty’s mother and sister are trapped, hiding in a clothing store, while Betty, who was next door eating a cupcake, runs toward them when she hears shots. Joy witnesses the shooter kill himself right in front of her. The months that follow are divided into three parts as Joy struggles with agoraphobia and substance use disorder, their mother channels her feelings into gun control activism, and Betty tries to hold everyone together even as her long-absent father disappoints her all over again. Betty’s incisive and sarcastic yet vulnerable narrative voice captures this exploration of trauma realistically, imbuing it with humor and authentic desperation and grief. A relationship she strikes up with Michael, the shooter’s half brother, feels a bit too obviously a plot device in places, but their warm, witty exchanges strike just the right chord, and readers will root for them to become more than friends. Most main characters are White; biracial Michael’s father is Indian American. Both Betty and Michael are pansexual.

An intelligent, expansive story of a family surviving the increasingly common unthinkable.