Thoughts & Prayers by Bryan Bliss

My latest read is the new novel from Bryan Bliss, Thoughts & Prayers.  This one is immensely powerful and uniquely told.  Bliss's novel is all about our reaction to trauma and the healing that must come from it.  It is about connecting with those around you and finding peace in their presence.  Even in shared trauma, we all heal differently, and Bliss has given us a novel, told in three different stories, about the different ways in which we find help.  

Thoughts & Prayers is a beautifully told story about three teens, Claire, Eleanor, and Brezzen, who are all survivors of a school shooting.  Each have handled the trauma in different ways, but each are searching for a path to healing.  While told in three separate stories, they are all connected to one traumatic and shared event in the lives of these three students.  This novel is powerful and important and will help the reader understand the trauma our kids go through each time we face these unspeakable acts. 

From Amazon: 

"In his unflinching and resonant new novel, Bryan Bliss shows that there is no straight line through trauma, no easy recipe for healing. Instead, in three loosely connected stories of young people bound by an all-too familiar tragedy, he deftly illuminates the small  moments of human connection and resolve that might just lead to a place of grace."—Gayle Forman, bestselling author of If I Stay and I Have Lost My Way

Fight. Flight. Freeze. What do you do when you can’t move on, even though the rest of the world seems to have? 

For readers of Jason Reynolds, Marieke Nijkamp, and Laurie Halse Anderson. Powerful and tense, Thoughts & Prayers is an extraordinary novel that explores what it means to heal and to feel safe in a world that constantly chooses violence.

Claire, Eleanor, and Brezzen have little in common. Claire fled to Minnesota with her older brother, Eleanor is the face of a social movement, and Brezzen retreated into the fantasy world of Wizards & Warriors.

But a year ago, they were linked. They all hid under the same staircase and heard the shots that took the lives of some of their classmates and a teacher. Now, each one copes with the trauma as best as they can, even as the world around them keeps moving.

Told in three loosely connected but inextricably intertwined stories, National Book Award–longlisted author Bryan Bliss’s Thoughts & Prayers follows three high school students in the aftermath of a school shooting. Thoughts & Prayers is a story about gun violence, but more importantly it is the story of what happens after the reporters leave and the news cycle moves on to the next tragedy. It is the story of three unforgettable teens who feel forgotten.