Hate List is a YA novel about the aftermath of a school shooting. Okay, you do get the pre-math and the math itself, a little bit, but 90% is about the aftermath. I don't read YA novels because I'm an A and no longer Y but I read this one because life is pretty random, just like school shootings. One here, one there, who knows where the next one will be? All you know is, there will be a next one. 
 This is an anguished tale told in the voice of 16 or 17 year old Valerie, and she went out with this lovely guy called Nick for three years, since she was 14 or 15 I guess, but he figured it was time for a crime like Columbine and he terminated their relationship by shooting a lot of their schoolmates, one teacher, Valerie herself, and then himself. After that, there was no possibility of a reconciliation. Some things can't be unsaid. 
 This book follows the complicated and frankly horrendous emotional, physical, familial and of course psychological fallout from the shooting. For instance, most of the school thinks Valerie was in cahoots with Nick, after all, she was his girlfriend and she wrote the famous hate List which is exposed to all by the police. But some think no, on the day of the massacre she was trying to stop him. It gets messy and depressing and I confess there were big globby tears in my eyes as I read the final scenes, which I had to surreptitiously wipe away in case my daughter spotted me as she was in the room, but I think I got away with it. 
 Yes there were a few things to complain about - for instance, Jennifer Brown, you need to check your head - please never again call your characters stupid names like Dr. Hieler (!) - and the shooting boyfriend is Nick Levil !! Give me a break. Also, but this is probably only a reflection of reality, if you took three words out of the conversations in this book, it would be 50 pages shorter - can you guess the words? Yes - cool, lame, and totally. 
 Our narrator Valerie writes in a minimalist zoned-out style which I found completely believable. I'm not saying she's the new Emma Bovary but she comes alive. She does say quite a few things like : 
 I had to bite my palms when I stepped out of the elevator on the fourth floor into the vestibule of the psychiatric ward at Garvin general. 
 Sample dialogue - Valerie is visiting a shooting victim who has been left disfigured. 
 "Yeah, they make suicides stay for three days or something like that. But most of them end up staying longer because their parents are so freaked out. Is your mom freaked out?" 
 "She is so beyond freaked you have no idea." 
 One big point this novel makes, by implication, is how easily young women can turn into pretty young zombies. Valerie kind of sleepwalks along with her lovely boyfriend. She's influenced by his darkness, his infatuation with death, okay, yes, the G word is not used but this young couple are clearly Goths. Black eyeliner is mentioned. Why Nick is constantly picked on at Garvin High School is also not really explored in much detail, but after the brief scenes which describe his poverty stricken home life and his tatty clothes clearly the motive for the bullying has more than a whiff of class prejudice about it. As Nick's anguish about being a continual target at school deepens, Valerie is still thinking that it's Val&Nick against the world and just by throwing up this screen of hatred expressed in the Hate List she writes up in her journal, they can survive. She doesn't see he's taking it all to a whole other level. Oh those horrendous later realisations! Ah humanity! 
 I didn't realise you were so unhappy. 
 I didn't realise what your life was really like. 
 and worse 
 I didn't realise you meant it! 
 At the end of the novel we are presented with an interview with the author who helpfully answers questions like Why was Valerie's dad so mean? (I wondered that too) and after that the first chapter of Jennifer Brown's next novel! How ...er...nice! Thank you! This did not used to happen in the days of Gustave Flaubert or James Joyce but it may have been useful. 
 All in all, another gothtastic, maxillo-facial read : 3.5 stars.