I have loved the opportunity to spend time researching novels to re-stockl our senior bookshelves in the school library that plays a central role in the life of the school. When I first took over the library was filled with dusty tomes that were never borrowed and languished there totally unloved.
Books like this, play a central role in ensuring that the library is stocked with fresh relevant fiction that appeals to the readers. It has a strong voice and a compelling plot that ensures that you speed through its pages, enjoying both its characterisation and dialogue whilst wanting to find out how all of its strands will be resolved by the end.
I have no hesitation in adding this to the 'must buy' list so that the senior students and staff of the school can enjoy it as much as I did. This is a gripping read that will be sure to grip its readers whether they are fans of this genre or coming to it for the first time through our now-thriving school library recommendation system. Thanks so much for allowing me to review it!

A subject that rings all to true, a high school shooting in a west texas school and the aftermath that effects not only those involved but also the local community.
And as for the why?
You will have to read to the end to find out.
A beautifully written story of sorrow, love and hope that will certainly cause a lot of pause for thought.

On average, more than one school shooting takes place in the United States every week. This is a topic that we need to be talking about, that books need to be written about. We can’t just keep brushing it under the carpet, sharing a few sad thoughts on social media when they happen, and then pushing them away until the next time it inevitably occurs. As the other novel on this topic I read this year, Only Child, illustrated, children as young as five are put through school shooting drills.
They know that school is not a safe place for them.
Only Child was a more traditional and cut-and-dry look at school shootings - I know, that sounds incredibly cold and flippant and blasé but honestly I don’t know how to explain the difference in any other way that that - because the main character’s brother was hit by the shooter and died instantaneously. A funeral - even a body in some cases when a person is lost at sea - gives people closure; it allows them to move on, and do what they can to heal.
They’re not stuck in limbo.
The family in Oliver Loving are different, because although Oliver was hit by the shooter, he did not die - instead he was catastrophically injured but remained alive if near-completely comatose. Every time a school shooting happens, we see the faces of the lost, but it is a completely different to consider the people who are not strictly fatalities.
I can not imagine that out of the scarily large number of victims of school shootings (honestly, I do not even want to know the number), not one of them is in a similar situation to this novel’s protagonist. And that no family is dealing with the same perpetual limbo that his loved ones inhabit.
I cried. I know, my heart is as cold as ice, but I did.
Oliver’s situation left me completely at a loss.
All of the thoughts about what kind of man this boy could have been feel all that more tangible when his fate still rests in midair; and I wanted, more than anything, for a miracle to happen.

I hate giving up on books! I really tried to read this several times but I just couldn't get on with it. I found the huge paragraphs of non essential, in my opinion, too long and the going backwards and forwards in a very short space a little too confusing.
Maybe one day I will try again and I will review it on my social media then.
Thanks to NetGalley and Stefan Merrill Block.

This was both heartbreaking and endearing and gripping in equal measure.. In the blink of an eye everything can change and life is never the same again. An excellent and profound book!

Actually 4.5 stars.
This was a book that I tried to read a couple of times but just couldn't get into. For some reason, I didn't give up and gave it another go yesterday. Again, I struggled initially to get into it but, again for reasons unknown, I persevered and, after an initial discomfort I got to a point where the book started gelling for me. At some point I started needing to know how the story ended and, with only a few breaks to eat and do other necessary stuff, I soon found myself with only half hour to go. It being bed time and me feeling my eyelids droop, I made the decision to put it down so I could give it my 100% today. I finished it off this morning and I am so glad I made the choices I did. Firstly to give it a third or fourth chance and secondly to leave the end til I was more alert.
It's the story of a family living in a small town in Texas. Predominantly the older son Oliver who, for the majority of the book, is in a vegetative state in an Assisted Care Facility. We learn about his early life through flashback leading up to the incident that caused his present state. We then learn, again through flashback, how that incident has affected his family specifically and the community in general. Back in the present we, along with others, eagerly await the results of new tests on Oliver, ones that may unlock the secrets he has kept inside for nearly ten years. Will they really find the key to unlock all the answers to the questions people have been struggling with? And what about the secrets that others have also been keeping. Will we finally get the catalyst to unlock all and finally bring peace to all affected?
Wow. What a ride this book took me on. Not my usual genre and written in a way that I initially struggled with, I am still unsure what drew me to this book or why I stuck with it. None of that matters though, just the fact that I did and I am glad I did because this, for me, was one of the most immersive books I have read in a little while. Once it eventually got its claws into me, it held me captive as I devoured every word.
Yes there were times where it dragged but just as I started thinking this, the author injected a little something into the mix that piqued my interest once again. There were scenes that I initially though were superfluous or foreign to the rest of what I was reading but I just let them sit with me and trusted that their inclusion would make sense eventually. Which, on the whole they did.
With the events that have occurred recently in a real school, holding some parallels with some of the events in this book, it was at times a little hard to read. Hard not to draw comparisons and make assumptions but, when the whole truth was eventually revealed towards the end of the book, a whole different perspective opened up before me.
It was a busy book all told, with parts told from the pov of several of the main characters. All with their own crosses to bear and all with their own secrets to hide. All with their own voice too which made it an easy book to follow. And, most importantly, all speaking with realism; warts and all. To say that it was a very character driven book would be a gross understatement.
It's also a very emotional read, a bit brutal in parts too. I did have to pause a few times to digest and cope with some of the things I was reading. That said, it never got too dark for me. there was always the underlying feeling of hope and also that things would eventually be OK. I guess by the end they were. Maybe not quite the OK I really wished for, but the OK that fitted. The OK that meant that the real healing could start. The OK that left me satisfied at the end.
My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

‘Once upon a time there was a boy who fell through a crack in time but he didn’t fall all the way.’

Following the momentous events at his school’s annual dance, Oliver lies in a coma – neither here nor gone but ‘suspended’ somewhere in between. ‘By your twentieth birthday, you had become a dimming hive of neurological data, a mute oracle, an obsession, a regret, a prayer, a vegetative patient in Bed Four at Crockett State Care Facility; the last hope your mother lived inside.’

In a way, the people around Oliver are suspended too, unable to move on from the fateful evening of the Bliss County Day School’s annual dance. More than anything, they are obsessed by the question: Why? Why was Rebekkah unharmed? Why was Oliver at the dance? What motivated a troubled young man, Hector Espina, to do what he did? They cling to the belief that Oliver will someday, somehow, be able to answer those questions; that he is the only one who can provide the answers. But is that actually the case?

The reader benefits from the gradual recounting of Oliver’s memories leading up to the evening of the dance, during which Oliver is always addressed in the second person. Interspersed are sections told from the point of view of Oliver’s mother (Eve), his father (Jed), his brother (Charlie) and Rebekkah (the object of Oliver’s affection). It becomes clear that they also have secrets and are weighed down by guilt: about the things they did or didn’t do; the things they did or didn’t say. Maybe if they’d acted or spoken, things would have turned out differently.

All the characters are convincing, with human flaws, and not always likeable. In Eve, Oliver’s mother, the reader gets an overwhelming sense of someone who wants to believe in miracles so much that it blinds her to reason, interpreting signs that others don’t see as indications of Oliver’s lucidity. However, does her steadfastness just disguise an inability to face up to the truth and take the right decision? Jed, Oliver’s father, is a failed artist, a disappointed man and a drunk unable to face up to what his son has become. Oliver’s brother, Charlie, dreams of being a writer and of writing his family’s story – Oliver’s story – but is unable to start the book, to find a way into it. ‘Like unstable plutonium, he had thought he could take the annihilating power of it and transform it into an astonishing source of energy. But at last he knew better, that he was just like the rest of his family, still pounding at the walls of an instant, now many years past.’

Then there’s Rebekkah Sterling, a rather elusive figure for much of the book, always hovering off stage but seeming to exercise a sort of gravitational pull on other characters. Oliver is enchanted by her from the first time he sees her and Charlie becomes convinced she has the answers to what happened that night. And others who came into her orbit prove significant as well. Talking of orbits and gravitational pulls, the book frequently alludes to astronomy, wormholes and even parallel universes. Does Oliver merely inhabit some ‘impassable otherworld of your memory, that place where you were still the same wholly whole Oliver’.

The tragic events at the Bliss County Day School dance have wider repercussions than just for Oliver’s family. The tragedy and the racial background of the person involved are usurped for political capital (now why does that sound familiar?), exploiting existing tensions over immigration from Mexico, informal segregation between the Hispanic and white population of Bliss and concerns about drugs being brought across the border. ‘It wouldn’t matter that Hector Espina had been an American-born citizen or that an Ecuadorian named Ernesto Ruiz stopped the kid that night. The fact was that Hector was a Latino…He was a demon of white imaginings let loose.’

And it’s as if the town died the day of the tragedy as well. The author conjures up an evocative picture of a rundown West Texas town with its abandoned houses and closed down businesses. In fact there is wonderful descriptive writing and use of quirky metaphors throughout the book. As Charlie reflects on what the tragedy has done to his family: ‘Ma – the immutable icon, the implacable white colossus that had stood guard over his childhood – had been badly fissuring, and Charlie had known that only he could fill the gaps. After all, Pa had already crumbled.’

Oliver Loving is both an examination of the impact of a tragedy on a family and a community, and an exploration of the ‘locked in’ state. It’s also about needing answers and about clinging on to hope. It is also a fantastic read. I received an advance reader copy courtesy of NetGalley and publishers, Atlantic Books, in return for an honest and unbiased review.

Oliver Loving has been lost in his body for 3,537 days. He is the martyr of Bliss, Texas, shot in an all-American high school massacre at the age of 17.

In the ten years since that night, Oliver has become 'a mute Oracle, a regret, a prayer'. His passive presence in a vegetative state makes him a blank canvas on which his family, school fellows, including sad, silent, enigmatic Rebekkah Sterling, medical team and others affected by the actions become like one of the universes his amateur astronomer father tells him about: ever changing and ever revolving round the core of Oliver's hospital bed. He becomes the meeting point where the local Latino and white communities intersect.

I've loved Stefan Merrill Block's writing since his debut novel, 'The Story of Forgetting', which was an astonishing fear for a writer just 26 years old. He has an astonishing ability to get under the skin of characters as different as Oliver's bereft (if not yet bereaved) mother, turning to kleptomania to buy stuff Oliver will need when he wakes proving to herself that she still believes he has a future; his alcoholic failed artist father, always a remote figure; and his gay younger brother, a failing writer. They are all trying to make sense of the tragedy with their own version of the story. They all search for meaning and an answer to 'why?'

Coming in 2018
This section features books coming in 2018 not featured elsewhere.



Publication Date: March 2018 from Atlantic.

Source: Netgalley

One warm, West Texas November night, a shy boy named Oliver Loving joins his classmates at Bliss County Day School’s annual dance, hoping for a glimpse of the object of his unrequited affections, an enigmatic Junior named Rebekkah Sterling. But as the music plays, a troubled young man sneaks in through the school’s back door. The dire choices this man makes that evening —and the unspoken story he carries— will tear the town of Bliss, Texas apart.

Nearly ten years later, Oliver Loving still lies wordless and paralyzed at Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, the fate of his mind unclear. Orbiting the still point of Oliver’s hospital bed is a family transformed: Oliver’s mother, Eve, who keeps desperate vigil; Oliver’s brother, Charlie, who has fled for New York City only to discover he cannot escape the gravity of his shattered family; Oliver’s father, Jed, who tries to erase his memories with bourbon. And then there is Rebekkah Sterling, Oliver’s teenage love, who left Texas long ago and still refuses to speak about her own part in that tragic night. When a new medical test promises a key to unlock Oliver’s trapped mind, the town’s unanswered questions resurface with new urgency, as Oliver’s doctors and his family fight for a way for Oliver to finally communicate — and so also to tell the truth of what really happened that fateful night.

Oliver Loving is a beautifully written and consuming story that looks at familial and community relationships in the aftermath of a tragedy – the sort of tragedy where the question “Why” cannot always be answered..

Using multiple views, one of which is the locked in Oliver, we see the before and the after, the changes the family goes through, the ways in which hope remains alive. It is a wonderfully compelling tale that digs deep into the emotional core of all of us, offering huge insight into human nature and leaving a lasting impression after the last page is done.

I was sad for Oliver and a life not lived, for his Mother who clung on through it all, this is entirely captivating, with a heartfelt mystery element and a real tug on the hearstrings.

It’s a different approach to the central theme, gorgeous prose and a real sense of place and personality, Oliver Loving is one of those stories that feels very real. If I had one small bugbear I think it may have over wrung out the middle part, but overall Oliver Loving is a literary delight and a deeply touching tale from first word to last.