Friday, February 26, 2016

A Mother's Reckoning

By Sue Klebold

Rated 4 Stars
Kindle Format

This is one of the saddest books I've ever read.  It's been more than seventeen years since this tragedy and when I saw that Sue Klebold had written a book I bought it hoping to read that the parents of the young men who had perpetrated this terrible crime had been able to put their lives back together and move on.  

Sue Klebold's book is a well written, heartbreakingly honest and introspective account of the step by step process of she and her husband went through in attempting deal with the horrible reality that their  son had viciously killed others and then himself  

I don't think anyone will ever really know why those boys did what they did.  I just feel so very sorry for everyone whose lives they destroyed or damaged.

Publisher's Summary

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill 12 students and a teacher and wound 24 others before taking their own lives. 
For the last 16 years, Sue Klebold, Dylan's mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror? And how, as his mother, had she not known something was wrong? Were there subtle signs she had missed? What, if anything, could she have done differently? 
These are questions that Klebold has grappled with every day since the Columbine tragedy. In A Mother's Reckoning, she chronicles with unflinching honesty her journey as a mother trying to come to terms with the incomprehensible. In the hope that the insights and understanding she has gained may help other families recognize when a child is in distress, she tells her story in full, drawing upon her personal journals, the videos and writings that Dylan left behind, and countless interviews with mental health experts. 
Filled with hard-won wisdom and compassion, A Mother's Reckoning is a powerful and haunting book that sheds light on one of the most pressing issues of our time. And with fresh wounds from the recent Newtown and Charleston shootings, never has the need for understanding been more urgent.