Written in the form of excerpts from interviews and the suicide notes, Give a Boy a Gun tells the story of a school shooting and its aftermath. It could have been a compelling story, but there was no real sense of engagement with the characters. The liberal use of footnotes with many interesting and disturbing real-life facts about school shooting and gun violence distracted from the story itself - for the sake of the story they might have been better at the end, although they might not have been real as much. For a teen read on school shootings [b:Hate List|6316171|Hate List|Jennifer Brown|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1242667034s/6316171.jpg|6501420] by Jennifer Brown is far superior.