One Breath Away

Adult chiller 

     I've sort of fallen off the stay up til midnight on New Year's Eve bandwagon since the kids have grown and flown.  I haven't gone all stodgy.  It's just Eugene hits the sack at his usual bedtime.  I've discovered that what is delightful done with others can lose its luster when it's just you and the cat.  This year I surprised myself by being so unable to put a book down that by the time I finished it 2023 had arrived.  The chiller I was reading, Heather Gudenkauf's One Breath Away, had swept me away from my cat cuddling perch on my sofa to a small Iowa town in the worst kind of crisis.

     The town of Broken Branch has one of the few remaining K-12 schools.  It was built in the 40s when school shootings were unimaginable.  Even the Cold War duck and cover drills were in the future.  Other than wings added in the 70s the structure was kept pretty much the same.  So there was nothing in place to keep the man with the gun from strolling in and taking the place hostage.

     Which would be a nightmare under the best of meteorological conditions.  Only a blizzard has swept in creating hazardous driving conditions and preventing officers trained to handle hostage situations from coming to the assistance of the local police force.  

     Holly is the mother of Augie (grade 8) and P.J. (3rd grade).  She's in a hospital in Arizona, badly burned in a household fire.  She'd had to send her children back to live with her parents in her childhood home.  Augie is her teenage daughter who has only been a member of her class eight weeks when there's a Code Red Lockdown.  Will is Augie's farmer grandfather who is afraid he'll fail his grandchildren just as he failed their mother. Mrs. Oliver is a career teacher on the verge of retirement.  She's fiercely determined to get all her children out alive even if it means bartering her life for theirs.  Nothing from college or decades of practice has prepared her for an obviously agitated gun wielding man in her classroom terrifying her third grade students.  Meg is the police officer whose daughter, Maria, if not for being absent, would be in that third grade classroom.

     Gudenkauf knew that a multiple narrator structure would be perfect for her story.

     "Each character, through thoughts, words, and actions, gives his or her account of one harrowing day.  Each perspective is uniquely framed by the individual character's memories and experiences.  My hope was to give the reader a glimpse into how a teacher, a child, a mother, a grandfather, and a member of law enforcement might react to the same terrible incident.

On a purrrsonal note, if you're an aspiring writer, even if chillers aren't you're genre of choice, you can learn a lot from studying Gudenkauf's writings.  So far I've discovered her to be a master of 1) building suspense convincingly and chillingly from the most quotidian of elements; 2) giving her characters distinctive personalities and convincing backstories; and 3) giving her narratives a strong sense of place that's too often missing in life as well as literature.  (Jules)

That was some party.  Cat treats galore!  (Tobago)

A great big shout out goes out to Heather Gudenkauf for her awesome narratives.

Tobago and Jules Hathaway 

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