How to Be Safe: A Novel

Written by Tom Mcallister

Narrated by Amy Landon

FORMER TEACHER HAD MOTIVE. Recently suspended for a so-called outburst, high school English teacher Anna Crawford is stewing over the injustice at home when she is shocked to see herself named on television as a suspect in a shooting at the school where she works. Though she is quickly exonerated, and the actual teenage murderer identified, her life is nevertheless held up for relentless scrutiny and judgment as this quiet town descends into media mania. Gun sales skyrocket, victims are transformed into martyrs, and the rules of public mourning are ruthlessly enforced. Anna decides to wholeheartedly reject the culpability she's somehow been assigned, and the rampant sexism that comes with it, both in person and online. A piercing feminist howl written in trenchant prose, How to Be Safe is a compulsively readable, darkly funny expose of the hypocrisy that ensues when illusions of peace are shattered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Apr 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781684410897

Reviews for How to Be Safe

[wagner5sarah35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I realize this novel likely isn't everyone's cup of tea, but something about it really spoke to me. Centered around a school shooting in a small town, much of the book is narrated by Anna, an English teacher who was fired just days before her students and coworkers were gunned down. In the aftermath, she is first suspected of involvement with the shooting, then cleared but still tormented by the guilt and trauma of seeing people she's known much of her life murdered. Moreover, Anna wants to be safe, in a world that feels increasingly violent and uncertain. There are pieces of Anna's struggle that I guess I could relate to almost too much and other pieces that feel representative of society, all of which make for a thought-provoking book. Overall, this is a really interesting book, but be forewarned about the subject matter.

[thomaspluck · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brutally comic story of the aftermath of a school shooting that flays the absurd present condition we tolerate. A cathartic read today, hopefully one we'll read years from now to get idea of what Americans once considered "normal."

[katiekrug · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How To Be Safe starts with a school shooting, but it's not really about that. Well, it is and it isn't. It's about violence - school violence obvously, political violence and terrorism, domestic violence, violence against women, mob violence, gun violence, and the mental violence of societal insecurity and uncertainty.McAllister's anti-hero is Anna, a not-quite-stable high school teacher with a lot of family and childhood baggage, who watches her town react to a shooting at a local school. We live inside Anna's head as she tries to make sense of what is going on around her, as she sometimes contributes to the chaos, and contemplates what it takes to be safe in the world.I loved this novel and inhaled it in two days. It could easily be read in one. It's dark and acerbic and visceral, and I found myself shocked a few times to remember it was written by a man. I kept picturing the author angrily pounding away on her laptop, pouring out her rage and fear and frustration. That is was written by a man is startling to me, to be honest. But I think it's important that it was, as a reminder that there are men who may not be able to live the experience of being a woman at a dangerous time, but who can empathize and try to find that voice inside themselves.I marked lots of passages - McAllister's writing is brutal and raw but also sometimes darkly funny.After being accosted by a man on the street offering her money to take her photograph and getting angry when she refused: "Women do not own thier bodies. Men take pictures of us when we are not looking. They surreptitiously record videos of our legs on the bus and load them to the internet, where other men can stare at our legs and masturbate. We wore a dress that day because it was hot outside, because it made us feel good about ourselves, because we had a date, because we felt entitled to dress however we liked. They gather in groups on corners and follow us home with their eyes. They leave the residue of their vision on our bodies. They tell us they love women because they love their mother and their sister and their daughter." (p. 84)On mass shootings: "Before the blood dries and clots, there's another one to report. Somewhere right now there is a boy acquiring a gun. There is a boy writing a manifesto. There is a man, angry at having been forgotten, at having been passed over, at finding out what life really is, loading his gun. There is a man fortifying his home and preparing for war. Listen and you can hear the hammers being cocked." (p. 121)Referring to an exchange with members of a local apocalyptic sect building a bunker in the woods: "They said they had a master carpenter building out the walls now. I did not envy her job. To be a carpenter for a Christian church is a significant burden, considering the lineage." (p. 208)5 stars

[schatzi_5 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Anna Crawford is at home when one of her former students shoots up the school where she used to work. Scrambling for motives and accomplices, Anna finds herself being named as a possible suspect, even though she has nothing to do with the shooting at all. The book focuses on Anna's life for a year after the shooting. This is a difficult book for me to rate. On the one hand, I really enjoyed the author's writing style, and I blew through this book like nobody's business. On the other hand, I was just left wanting more - I'm not exactly sure what I was seeking, exactly, but I didn't find it.The narrator is...unreliable, shall we say. She says things that I assume we are meant to take literally, and yet are obviously impossible. She focuses a lot on the sun disappearing from the town, for example. Obviously the sun HASN'T disappeared - how could it? I'd be okay if this was just a metaphor, but the narrator really hammers home repeatedly that, no, the sun is literally gone, and the town has to make artificial floodlights to simulate sunshine. That was just too weird for me, not to mention distracting. But I kind of liked her anyway, in spite of her increasing alcohol usage and how she treated her brother, Calvin, who was nothing but kind and considerate to her. There's some dark humor in here, but the subject of school shootings it just a little too raw for me to appreciate the humor aspects of the book. Altogether I enjoyed the book, but I wouldn't solidly recommend it.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How To Be Safe by Tom McAllister is told from the point of view of a high school English teacher, a woman who was not at the school the day the shooting happened. With the murderer dead, there's a search for possible accomplices and Anna is briefly investigated by the FBI and hounded by the media.As time moves on, Anna looks around at how the shooting has changed the town for good, and how easily these school shootings, and all the mass shootings, are quickly moved past, a few more guns are sold, a monument commissioned, a few more cameras installed to keep watch. But Anna is not moving on. She is consumed with how to be safe, when there are so many dangers out there. On the highway, you can run into more dangers than you've ever imagined. Not just distracted drivers but stalkers, sex traffickers, teens throwing rocks through windshields from the overpass. If you pass enough cars, you will have passed at least one murderer; that's just statistics.This novel is narrated by Anna, who spends a lot of her time thinking about what is dangerous. Now out of a job, she spends her day not interacting with her former friends, or spending time with her brother, although she finds that no matter how badly she wants to stay safe, people keep intruding into her life, and she can't stop herself from going outside and interacting with the other people living in the dangerous world. "The world is not out to get you.""I never said it was." Though I thought: What if it is?"Your paranoia makes you not even human. It just makes you this jagged shard of fear that can't do anything."I turned off the TV and stood. If he wanted to do things, then we would do things. I put on a jacket and some shoes and told him to follow me. If we got killed, it would be on him.How To Be Safe is very much a commentary on how we have chosen to live in the US today, and how that affects our communities. But despite the subject matter, this book isn't bleak; Anna is too full of fight for that, and McAllister writes with a detached humor that suits this novel very well.

[beamis12 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Another timely read taken right out of our news headlines, a school shooting and a teacher, Anna, who though she had nothing to do with the shooting, is said to have a motive. After that many don't care if she is guilty or not, she has been indicted by the news networks. This reads like everything we see on our news channels, the talking heads and their suppositions, the rerunning of footage, the thoughts about the shooter, etc. The victims are portrayed, could something they had done in their past lead to this? Anna gets emails from people wanting her dead, punished and other horrible things.Anna herself is an unreliable narrator and maybe more. It is at one a warning and an indictment of the power of our gun culture, social media and journalists. The writing is very matter of fact, but shows an insight into the frenzy and attempts to make sense of these mass shootings. At first I was avidly turning the pages, there was a darkness but also an irony behind the words that I found interesting. After the half way point though I lost interest a bit, too much of the same tone, maybe just too much in general. This is a good book, definitely worth reading, there are important truths within. ARC from Edelweiss.