The Shape of Thunder

The Shape of Thunder

Jasmine Warga

Balzer & Bray, 2021

288 pages

Grades 4-7

Realistic Fiction

Alternating points of view tell the story of two best friends/next door neighbors and the devastating event that changed their lives. Cora's sister Mabel was killed almost a year ago in a school shooting. Already having to process the abandonment of her mother, Cora will not speak to her best friend, Quinn, and must depend on her professor father and maternal grandmother. Quinn's family reacts differently from the shooting, mostly because it was their son who was responsible, using his father's guns. Quinn has mixed feelings about her brother, hating him for what he did, yet still loving him, because, well, he's her brother. Her feelings are even more complex because she knew he was into the guns and feels partly responsible for not telling anyone. The girls have an uncomfortable reunion as they join forces to try to time travel to life before the event. Is time travel possible? Genius Cora believes so and the two will do whatever it takes to get to their siblings before the shooting.

This is a very different novel than Warga's other work that I read Other Words for Home, which traces the experience of a middle-eastern immigrant through narrative poetry. Warga does in this new novel demonstrate a bit of the middle-eastern/American experience through Cora and Mabel's heritage in which Cora is trying to further explore and that the shooting was partially racially motivated. Both girls are suffering from misplaced guilt and PTSD, yet their family's handle it in different ways. Cora's family has her in therapy, while Quinn's father tries to sweep the incident under the rug, including his role in the tragedy by owning the guns, and decides to simply relocate to give the family a fresh start. Finally, Quinn convinces her parents that she needs professional help and the reader is left with the impression that they have heard her. This was a very sad book and I had trouble getting through it. My library system owns twenty-five copies of this title and only eight are currently available, so tween readers, who tend to be attracted to sad books, disagree with me. The time travel exploration is a cool ingredient to the story and that was the hook that got me.  Ultimately, the reader is left with a sense of hope and, maybe, an understanding about the seriousness of gun ownership.