Marieke Nijkamp’s debut novel is This is Where it Ends.From her Q & A with Dahlia Adler for the B&N Teen Blog:
Researching for this book could not have been easy. What were some of the most standout things you learned while looking into school shootings?--Marshal Zeringue
I spent a lot of time doing research, from reading investigation reports to watching documentaries to listening to recordings of 911 calls. That last part of research was particular harrowing, but I felt it was important, both to understand and to be respectful to the experience. I did not shy away from telling the story, so I could not shy away from doing the research.
But what really stood out to me is that, through news reports and popular culture, we have a very specific image of who a school shooter is. A loner. A failure. A young guy addicted to violence, bent on revenge. And that simply isn’t true. There is no such thing as a set profile for a school shooter. They can be loners, but they can also be part of the popular crowd. They can be high school dropouts, but more often than not they’re straight-A students. The one thing the vast majority of shooters has in common is that they’re white guys who (often) struggle with a combination of entitlement and not feeling seen, heard, recognized (again, often) as a result of either experiences of grief and loss, and/or of bullying. And that is a decidedly different problem than the (trench coat mafia–inspired) image of...[read on]