Library's review
Gudenkauf tells her story in short, staccato chapters that alternate viewpoints among a variety of characters staged in different places: There’s Meg, the police officer who may be closer to the mystery’s center than she realizes; Augie, the 14-year-old recent transplant from Arizona whose little brother P.J. is in the classroom occupied by the gunman; Mrs. Oliver, the teacher in P.J.’s classroom who is determined to protect her students even if it costs her her life; Will, Augie and P.J.’s grandfather, desperate not to lose the grandchildren he’s only just met; and Holly, mother of Augie and P.J., stuck in an Arizona hospital with severe burns after a kitchen accident.
Gudenkauf uses the crisis situation to explore the dynamics of life in a small town. Holly couldn’t wait to leave Broken Branch in her rear-view mirror all those years ago, and was determined to never return or let her children meet their grandparents. I kept expecting a dramatic reveal of just what horror had been inflicted on her childhood to make her feel that way. It turns out her farmer dad … made her work on the farm? Really? That’s an extremely weak underpinning for the central relationships that are supposed to drive the story. And it’s emblematic of the essential problems in the book as a whole: The entire setup is dramatic and fraught with tension, but every potential powder keg seems to fizzle when the fuse is lit. Part of the problem is the dizzying nature of the super-short chapters and the whiparounds from character to character. Too many times the chapters barely advanced the story and seemed to serve only as a means to create an air of forced suspense. I give Gudenkauf credit for coming up with a surprising answer to the “who is the gunman and what does he want” question, but by then I was just a little bit bored with the story. Bored with a story about a gunman in a school? That’s no author’s idea of a happy ending.
On the personal side, I was fascinated by the location of the story, living as I do in Iowa (check), about an hour from Waterloo (check), in a small town (check), whose name contains the word Branch (check). It was mildly interesting to imagine that the story might have been set in my town, although the setting doesn’t really align in the end (this town has three separate school buildings for elementary, middle, and high schools, while the town in the book has a single K-12 school building). I learned from a Q&A with the author at the end of the e-book that she graduated from the University of Iowa (and was a student there when the campus suffered its own mass shooting tragedy in 1991), so she certainly knows the area well enough to make it believable. It’s a pity the book didn’t quite live up to its early promise.
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In the midst of a sudden spring snowstorm, an unknown man armed with a gun walks into an elementary school classroom. Outside the school, the town of Broken Branch watches and waits. Officer Meg Barrett holds the responsibility for the town's children in her hands. Will Thwaite, reluctantly entrusted with the care of his two grandchildren by the daughter who left home years earlier, stands by helplessly and wonders if he has failed his child again. Trapped in her classroom, Evelyn Oliver watches for an opportunity to rescue the children in her care. And thirteen-year-old Augie Baker, already struggling with the aftermath of a terrible accident that has has brought her to Broken Branch, will risk her own safety to protect her little brother. As tension mounts with each passing minute, the hidden fears and grudges of the small town are revealed as the people of Broken Branch race to uncover the identity of the stranger who holds their children hostage.… (more)