How to Be Safe

by Tom McAllister

Overview

A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

“Explosive” –Entertainment Weekly

“Scalding” –The New Yorker

“One of the most highly acclaimed novels of the year thus far.” –Bustle

FORMER TEACHER HAD MOTIVE. Recently suspended for a so-called outburst, high school English teacher Anna Crawford is stewing over the injustice at home when she is shocked to see herself named on television as a suspect in a shooting at the school where she works. Though she is quickly exonerated, and the actual teenage murderer identified, her life is nevertheless held up for relentless scrutiny and judgment as this quiet town descends into media mania. Gun sales skyrocket, victims are transformed into martyrs, and the rules of public mourning are ruthlessly enforced. Anna decides to wholeheartedly reject the culpability she’s somehow been assigned, and the rampant sexism that comes with it, both in person and online. A piercing feminist howl written in trenchant prose, How to Be Safe is a compulsively readable, darkly funny exposé of the hypocrisy that ensues when illusions of peace are shattered.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631494147
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	04/03/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Tom McAllister is the author of The Young Widower’s Handbook and nonfiction editor of Barrelhouse magazine. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is an associate professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/01/2018
This darkly humorous primal scream of a novel takes as its subject the madness of modern American life, with all manner of violence, misogyny, paranoia, and self-righteousness on full, seedy display. At the center is a mass shooting at a public school, which leaves young high school English teacher Anna Crawford devastated. Already on what she considers an unjust suspension, Anna is further implicated in the tragedy, and she spends the entire novel trying to understand what happened and searching in vain for a way to be "safe." McAllister (The Young Widower's Handbook) suggests that this may not be possible, given the Internet trolls, vigilante busybodies, and future mass murderers hiding anonymously and angrily among us. Remarkably, the author is able to find some humor in the situation. VERDICT A blistering, Swiftian portrait of a nation that has lost its moral center, this book is a compelling from start to finish. Enthusiastically recommended for fans of literary fiction, psychological drama, and dystopian fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 10/16/17.]—Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Library Journal

Darkness suffuses How to Be Safe, Tom McAllister's heady and unsettling exploration of America's gun violence epidemic…Yet this is far more than a ripped-from-the-headlines story. McAllister…delivers here a portrait of a nation vibrating with failure and humiliation…One of the book's greatest successes is its exploration of the overlapping forces and impulses behind our nation's sexual-harassment and firearms crises…On the whole…the writing sears—and reminds us of literature's power to fill a void that no amount of inhaling the vapors of Twitter will satisfy.

The New York Times Book Review - Lauren Mechling

02/26/2018
For a brief time in the relentless latest from McAllister (following The Young Widower’s Handbook), suspended high school English teacher Anna Crawford is named a person of interest in the police investigation of a mass shooting at her school. Her first-person narrative picks up in the aftermath of the tragedy. Anna was suspended before the shooting for an unspecified outburst in the classroom. After the shooting, which ends when the unnamed male shooter kills himself, broadcast journalists show her picture and identify her as a suspect. In the chaos following the tragedy, she is bombarded with threatening phone calls, her home is searched by the FBI, and friends betray her. Even after the shooter is identified as a student and it is proven that he had no accomplices, the damage done to Anna proves hard for her to move past. McAllister’s novel unfolds both as grim social commentary and a subtle exploration of the stages of grief. Anna, with some gallows humor, describes journalists swarming the young shooter’s house and analyzing him ad nauseam, the way she becomes a target for well-wishers seeking to save her, and the constant churning arguments of both gun control opponents and proponents. Though Anna’s voice is strong, the novel falters in its depiction of the tragedy’s fallout, often electing to skim the surface instead of going deep. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"This is one of those books you don't know if you can read, and then after you don't know how you lived in a world without it. It's chock full of the things that are killing us: mass shootings, misogyny, the internet, media frenzies, tribalism. And it's so wonderful - so furious and so funny and urgent and needed in this mad ugly space we're sharing with each other. I can't believe this book was written by a man - but I'm so happy Tom McAllister wrote it."

Amber Sparks

"Vicious, hilarious, shocking and sad, How to Be Safe is biting political satire that levels its targets, soft and hard. Tom McAllister's vision of a violent, pious, hysterical America is worthy of Denis Johnson, Margaret Atwood and, yes, Mark Twain."

Stewart O'Nan

"Scalding. . . .[How to Be Safe] captures the unreality and absurdity of the American mass-murder playbook. . . . In McAllister’s passion and exhaustion, in his struggle to communicate the incommunicable, one hears murmurs of Emma González’s speech at the protest on Saturday."

New Yorker - Katy Waldman

"Combining a deep character study, prescient satire, and an unfortunately all-too-timely evisceration of U.S. gun culture, McAllister’s well-voiced and remarkably observed page-turner is in almost all ways an anti-thriller—itself a comment on the current, terrifying mundanity of similar events."

starred review Booklist

"It's heartening to see a male writer explore the issue [of toxic masculinity] with such nuance. McAllister deserves tremendous credit for his perceptive work here. . . . The author's indictment of a violent, paranoid society is searing."

Dallas Morning News - Shawna Seed

"How to be Safe is a blistering indictment of America's insanity: our devotion to guns, our addiction to masculinity, our obsession with muscling our way toward an exceptionalism built upon our own inflated sense of self. Tom McAllister is an exceptionally talented novelist: funny, biting, and bold. I'd be inclined to call him a satirist if not for the fact that every word in this novel is true."

Wiley Cash

"A gutting, shocking novel that circles a small-town tragedy, How to Be Safe is one of the most highly acclaimed novels of the year thus far. When she becomes the primary suspect in a school shooting, English teacher Anna Crawford is suddenly subjected to cruel, relentless scrutiny, sexism, and judgment — even after she's exonerated of the crime."

Bustle

"Anna sees that something is rotten in these United States, and she refuses to gloss over it. . . . [How To Be Safe’s] brutal honesty befits the times."

TIME - Sarah Begley

"Tom McAllister’s How to Be Safe is as startling as the crack of a bullet. The story’s volatile tone tears through the despair of our era’s devotion to guns. . . . Like nothing else I’ve read, How to Be Safe contains within its slim length the rubbed-raw anxieties, the slips of madness, the gallows humor and the inconsolable sorrow of this national pathology that we have nursed to monstrous dimensions."

The Washington Post - Ron Charles

"Haunting."

The Oprah Magazine O

"Explosive, senseless, and utterly chaotic, Tom McAllister's How to Be Safe depicts the aftermath of a school shooting in a way that sadly befits the times. His book centers on Anna, an English teacher stunned to see herself named as a suspect. Her anger, which threads the book, is cathartic."

Entertainment Weekly

"A kaleidoscopic portrait of a Pennsylvania town in the aftermath of a school shooting, How to Be Safe is a haunting bulletin from the fever dream that is the contemporary United States, a nation on the verge of self-destruction. Former teacher Anna Crawford is very reasonably at her wit's end, and her vision of her hometown is relentlessly dark and relentlessly beautiful, and also, don't shoot me, relentlessly funny. Tom McAllister's searing novel won't make you feel safe, but it will almost certainly make you feel connected to everyone who knows that everything must change."

Katherine Hill

★ 2018-01-23
A brilliant, tragically timely second novel from the author of The Young Widower's Handbook (2017).FORMER TEACHER HAD MOTIVE. When this chyron rolls across the bottom of a cable news segment, Anna Crawford becomes complicit in a high school shooting. Never mind that she had nothing to do with the crime; once she's part of the story, she's guilty of...something. This novel is an indictment of gun culture, hot-take journalism, and social media, and if that sounds like a miserable premise for a novel, fear not: McAllister is a brave and stylish writer, and Anna is a singular creation. At first, she seems like a classic unreliable narrator, but it quickly becomes hard to decide which is crazier: Anna or the world she's describing. As a one-time teacher and a thoroughgoing misfit—she was fired for being "unpredictable" just before the shooting—Anna is perfectly positioned to understand the shooter even as she recognizes that both his teen angst and his deadly rage are hackneyed. Once she achieves secondhand fame, she notes that the strangers who want to kill her, those who want to rape her, and those who want to do both—in that order—share the same fantasies of dominance. "In America," she says, "we send children to school to get shot and to learn algebra and physics and history and biology and literature. Less civilized nations don't have such an organized system for murdering their children. Mass murders in undeveloped countries occur because they are savages." Anna doesn't just worry about guns; she sees how misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and classism shape a society in which assault weapons are fetish objects. The horror is offset—or maybe thrown into sharp relief—by moments of mordant humor. When an evangelizing acquaintance tries to frighten Anna with images of darkness and demons and a final battle between good and evil, Anna says, "You might want to make this sound less exciting…I kind of want to not repent just so I can see the whole scene." Then she adds, "People don't want to be bored."Intensely smart. Sharply written.

Kirkus Reviews