Miriam is an ordinary schoolgirl with a carefree bunch of friends, and shes just embarked on her first relationship with her sweet and loving boyfriend Toby. She lives with her dad and she has a good relationship with her grandparents. All this ordinary happiness is shattered when one of Miriams schoolmates goes berserk one day at school with a handgun and kills several pupils and teachers. Miriams beloved Toby is shot right in front of her. Miriam and her surviving friends are distraught. Shock, grief, bereavement, terror Miriam and her friends run the gamut of emotions in the days, weeks and months following the shooting. But the worst emotion of all is guilt. Is it our fault? is the haunting question that tortures Miriam as she tries to piece her life together again. The story of a school shooting and its awful aftermath; a psychologically convincing study of grief, loss and guilt and their effects on young lives

 

 

This book has been graded for interest at 14 years.

There are 280 pages in this book.

It is aimed at Young Adult readers. The term Young Adult (YA) is used for books which have the following characteristics: (1) aimed at ages 12-18 years, US grades 7-12, UK school years 8-15, (2) around 50-75k words long, (3) main character is aged 12-18 years, (4) topics include self-reflection, internal conflict vs external, analyzing life and its meaning, (5) point of view is often in the first person, and (6) swearing, violence, romance and sexuality are allowed.

This book was published in 2016 by Little Island .

Anna Seidl is a young German author, and this is her first book. It was a publishing sensation in Germany (under the title Es wird keine Helden geben) and Anna won an emerging author award for it. She lives with her parents and is still in full-time education. Siobhan Parkinson is one of Ireland's best-known writers for children. She has written almost thirty books, most of them for children and teenagers, for which she has won a bagful of awards and nominations, and her books have been translated into about twenty languages. She was Ireland's first Children's Laureate. She is visually impaired, which means she has to rely mainly on audiobooks for reading, and she works by using magnification software and a voice on her computer. She lives in Dublin with her husband, who is a woodturner and without her grown-up son, who is a book editor.