Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published May 2022
336 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
For readers of This Is How It Ends and All the Bright Places, How We Ricochet takes an intimate and unflinching look into the devastating consequences of a mass shooting for one girl and her close-knit family, from Faith Gardner, acclaimed author of Girl on the Line.
It seems sometimes a charade that we continue celebrating in the face of relentless tragedy.
How dare we? But then ... what else is there to do?
Betty's mom needed new pants for her job.
That was why Betty was at the mall with her mom and sister when the shooting started.
Afterward, nothing is the same.
There are no easy answers to be found, and Betty's search for them leads her to Michael, the brother of the shooter. But this path only shows Betty one thing: that everything she thought she knew—about herself, about the world around her—can change in a heartbeat.
A moving, powerful journey of life after tragedy, How We Ricochet is a fearless and necessary story for our time that will resonate with readers everywhere.
"Gardner's unforgettable voice blends Jodi Picoult's emotional, ripped-from-the-headlines storytelling with Mindy McGinnis's unflinchingly honest protagonists. Gardner's gorgeous language and the atmospheric tone makes this a well-crafted, genre-defying story that deserves a wide readership." - Booklist (starred review)
"Gardner portrays complex, vulnerable characters navigating the aftermath of gun violence in this emotionally charged novel...Though the story is told from Betty's point of view, her mother's fury and her sister's terror are as palpable as Betty's burning desire to understand why the event happened and whether it was preventable." - Publishers Weekly
"An intelligent, expansive story of a family surviving the increasingly common unthinkable." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about How We Ricochet was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Faith Gardner is the author of How We Ricochet, Girl on the Line, The Second Life of Ava Rivers, and Perdita. When she's not writing, she plays in the band Plot 66. She lives in the East Bay area.
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