Sterling is a small, ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens - until a student enters the local high school with an arsenal of guns and starts shooting, changing the lives of everyone inside and out. The daughter of the judge sitting on the case is the state's best witness - but she can't remember what happened in front of her own eyes. Or can she?
This was a completely different read for me than it would have been before April 16, 2007, since I live in a community that has experienced one of these tragedies. I was really struck by some of the similarities between what happens in the book and what happened at Virginia Tech, from the teacher that loses his life protecting his students to the memorial that is put up for the shooter by unknown persons and then removed (though the shooter in the book isn’t dead). Everyone knows that Picoult always has a twist at the end, so I wasn’t surprised by the twist in this one. This was a hard read (for me), but it was quite good.
