PLEASE PAY ATTENTION

A school shooting survivor with cerebral palsy struggles to heal.

A year after a shooting at her school, Beatrix Coughlin recounts the days before and after the tragedy in present-tense letters in verse. At home, Bea and her adoptive mom, Maxine, are supported by Lucius, their kindhearted neighbor, and his husband, Aaron. As a sixth grade Buddy to a Little at Cedar Crest Presbyterian, Bea learns card tricks to cheer up Josie Garcia, a kindergartener with anxiety. But after the shooting, neither home nor school feels safe—especially because Bea, who uses a wheelchair, couldn’t run or hide. Plagued by nightmares and terrified of loud noises, Bea feels like “a person / who cannot save herself.” But if she can’t save herself, how can she help when it seems like “everybody is fighting for change” to gun control laws? Sumner, who based the story on a school shooting in her Nashville community, poignantly portrays the devastation that gun violence wreaks while leaving room for hope. While she doesn’t sugarcoat Bea’s terror, grief, or post-traumatic stress, the verse format allows readers to process the events piece by piece, tempering the vivid emotional imagery. Bea’s gradual improvement via equine therapy and Max’s emphatic support are heartening, and readers will root both for Bea’s recovery and for adults in power to “please pay attention / and then / act.” Bea and Max are implied white, and there’s racial diversity among the secondary characters.

Heart-wrenching yet hopeful.