Trigger warning: Gun violence
I didn’t expect for this book to make my tears fall – I was, if not constantly, annoyed with some of the characters. But in the end, it did make me cry. Hate List is another book about bullying, a gruesome story of being the target and getting even. Gruesome, because the target of the bullying Nick Levil, decided to get even by shooting all the kids whose names were in a list written by his girlfriend, Valerie Leftman, who narrated the story. The story actually focused more on what happened after the result of the bullying took place.
All of them are victims, and everyone is determined to forget that. When something awful happens, people tend to seek blame, and it doesn’t matter just how they are gonna do it, so long as someone else is at fault. I think it’s human nature. In this case, Valerie took all the blame, since the culprit also killed himself. Valerie was Nick’s girlfriend and she was the one who wrote the hate list. No one bothered to ask if she too, was hurting because she lost someone too, someone so dear to her. And no one even bothered to question why there exists a hate list in the first place.
Healing takes time… And sometimes, space. The principal, Mr. Angerson is just too compulsive to believe that everything in school has turned lovely after the shooting. I think there’s nothing wrong with it as long as it’s true. What he’s doing though, is that he refuses to see what’s really happening. A lot of kids are still in pain, and some are still haunted by the frightening images of the murders. Valerie’s mom, as too concerned as she was a parent, becomes overly protective to give her the trust that she needs in order to be able to get over the tragedy.
Media can sometimes be a pain. There is what we call unbiased reporting, but more often than not, some media men exist to let the people hear what they want to hear. Let’s face it. Publicity is not always healthy. Like in this situation, Valeri felt harassed and confined, by the knowledge that the whole world knew about her guilt in the incident. But when the police finally decided that Valerie was innocent, the media just stopped the coverage. Really, how unfair is that?
Upon reading all these books, I am starting to have a new perspective on bullying. Now it isn’t just about humiliation and torment. The psychological abuse and the emotional torture it brings to its victims are quite painful enough to be destructive.
