How to Be Safe

A Novel

audio cd

Published by HighBridge Audio.

ISBN:
978-1-68441-088-0
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(1 review)

Recently suspended for a so-called outburst, high school English teacher Anna Crawford is stewing over the injustice at home when she is shocked to see herself named on television as a suspect in a shooting at the school where she works. Though she is quickly exonerated, and the actual teenage murderer identified, her life is nevertheless held up for relentless scrutiny and judgment as this quiet town descends into media mania. This is a piercing feminist howl written in trenchant prose, a compulsively readable, darkly funny expos? of the hypocrisy that ensues when illusions of peace are shattered.

3 editions

Review of 'How to be safe' on 'Storygraph'

If Franny Glass lived today in a small Pennsylvania town instead of the world of JD Salinger, she might be like Anna Crawford, protagonist and narrator of How to Be Safe. It's interesting that both male authors choose a unreliable, socially dysfunctional female narrator, to expose society's sanctimony.

What makes this book marketable and trendy is it's examination of gun culture through the eyes of the people living in the hinterlands. Of course it's written by an east coast elite.

What makes this book interesting is the main character's nonconformity. Like Salinger, there's sharp humor directed at the conventional ways and popular culture of the time.

On building a moment to the school shooting:
"They felt delighted to commemorate the worse moment in their town's history."
On unreliability:
"It's hard to say whether I was lying then or if I am lying now."
On dignity:
"I had to make a …