After

After, by Francine Prose, is another one of the books I got at the library last week. It’s a fictional story that takes place after a high school shooting fifty miles away from the high school where the protagonist, Tom Bishop, goes. But when a grief and crisis counselor is sent to the school, he starts taking over the school, and students that have nothing wrong with them are sent to a kind of camp called Operation Turnaround, as if there was something wrong with them, and teachers who try to help them mysteriously disappear.

I got the book under the impression that it was an exciting mystery. It wasn’t. I was expecting some sort of resolution at the end, or at least some kind of conflict. There wasn’t. All that happens is that Tom finds out what is going on, tells his dad, and they run away. The end. It was very depressing, and I didn’t really like it. But it was well written, and the characters reacted believably to the hardships they went through, so it wasn’t terrible, I just didn’t like the story.