Day: August 3, 2016

A Mother’s Reckoning

 

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A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy
Author: Sue Klebold
336 Pages in Hardback

Published: February 15, 2016
Dates Read: May 24- June 7, 2016

My Rating: 4 Stars

 

Book Summary from Amazon:

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-four others before taking their own lives.

For the last sixteen years, Sue Klebold, Dylan’s mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror? And how, as his mother, had she not known something was wrong? Were there subtle signs she had missed? What, if anything, could she have done differently?

These are questions that Klebold has grappled with every day since the Columbine tragedy. In A Mother’s Reckoning, she chronicles with unflinching honesty her journey as a mother trying to come to terms with the incomprehensible. In the hope that the insights and understanding she has gained may help other families recognize when a child is in distress, she tells her story in full, drawing upon her personal journals, the videos and writings that Dylan left behind, and on countless interviews with mental health experts.

Filled with hard-won wisdom and compassion, A Mother’s Reckoning is a powerful and haunting book that sheds light on one of the most pressing issues of our time. And with fresh wounds from the recent Newtown and Charleston shootings, never has the need for understanding been more urgent.

All author profits from the book will be donated to research and to charitable organizations focusing on mental health issues.


My review:

Wow. What a heart breaking and at times hard to read book. But I made it through it. It is also hard to review. It is hard to review a book that is about something so tragic in so many way.  All those lives lost, including Sue Klebold’s son.  Sue Klebold gives her story of that fateful day at Columbine High School. You can feel her anguish and sadness at first losing her son to suicide and coming to the realization of what Dylan did.

You can see the whole “hindsight is 20/20” realizations she has afterward. And you can see how much it hurts.

The book also deals a lot with raising awareness on suicide and mental health, which she calls brain health and brain illness, with good reasons.

This book is recommended!