Eli is the shooter, Eddie is the husband of a victim (Casey) and Rose is a student at the college where the shooting occurs - she becomes involved with another victim after the shooting. Bloomland is the story of a mass shooting, the life events that precipitate the shooting and the aftermath. Written in the second person narrative, the narrator has a connection / relationship with each of these individuals and it is he who tells their stories. Early reviewers were quite critical of the second person narrative and focused on the shortcomings and difficulties with the writing style at the expense of the storyline.

John Englehardt has written an important, if not heartbreaking and difficult story. Single events can be catastrophic and life altering and it is easy for us to miss the signs as we struggle or avoid the struggle to cope with the trauma of loss. The author adds a little lightness to the story by setting it in Ozarka University "home of the Raccoons".

While the second person narrative writing style does make the story a little harder to follow, Bloomland is well written and accurately captures the angst we are feeling during unsettling times. ( )

The description of the book sounded interesting, the book was not. The characters and their "issues" didn't seem like they were even part of the same book. I know the author was trying to show the different feelings and lives of people affected by a school shooting but the way this was written/organized, it just came out as a jumbled mess or newspaper clippings thrown together.
There were descriptions used through out the book (he xxx like yyy) that made ZERO sense which added to the overall confusion.
I would have given it 1 star except for the fact that there were a few lines in the book that I liked. I can't remember any of them now but I do recall myself thinking, "Hey, that was insightful...how did he manage to not edit that out?" ( )

Probably I ended up listening to this novel three times as I had difficulty keeping narrators straight and it was hard to get back into it after several days pause in listening, so I kept starting over on the disk. I look forward to actually reading this as the second person narrator is challenging to write, but it does not work well on on audio. I received the audiobook for review from the Early Reviewers program. ( )

I really wanted to like this book more than I did, but there were a couple of things holding it back for me. The first was the author's use of 2nd person narration combined with multiple narrators. Writing in the 2nd person is typically a risky move, and in some ways it does pay off, but I found it particularly confusing with multiple narrators, since I would lose track of which "you" was currently the subject. The other thing that made this book harder to love for me was the multiple narrators in general - the way the story would bounce around between the three (technically four, counting the overarching narrator) stories and I'd have to re-calibrate every time, since the stories are only somewhat interconnected. Also, an issue specific to the audio version of this work - as other reviewers have suggested, the person reading the audiobook has a fairly hypnotic and monotone delivery, so I found it easy to get distracted and/or lost while listening. I do wonder if I may have enjoyed the print version of this book more.

There were things I enjoyed about the book - I particularly liked the insights into Eli, trying to unravel the motivation behind his decisions. I liked the almost poetic descriptions of some things in the book, like Rose's photography visits to the hospital. Ultimately, I'd suggest if you are going to give this a read, pick up the book or ebook rather than the audio version.

Note: I received a free copy of the audiobook from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. ( )

It’s finals week in a small agricultural college when a student armed with an automatic rifle steps into the library and starts firing. Twelve dead, lives shattered.

This book tells the story of the shooter, one of his teachers, and one of his victims who was the wife of the teacher.

It progressed from their stories before, the incident itself and then the aftermath.

All points of view are told in the second person – ‘You are walking down a hallway’. As I listened to the audiobook version, this made it somewhat hard to keep characters straight. Several times I back tracked and re-listened.

It’s a story from newspaper headlines, and the author’s attempt to give faces to the unimaginable. Unfortunately, I felt there were few new insights and little new ground in this book.

Three stars.

I received a copy through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program in exchange for an honest review. ( )