This Can Never Not Be Real

LoveReading4Kids Says

Solidarity through struggling to survive. Community through catastrophe. Hope through heartache, and life after loss. Sera Milano’s searingly stirring This Can Never Not Be Real shows how the human spirit can endure the most horrific experiences, in this case a brutal terrorist act that turns a quiet community’s annual festival into a bloodbath.

Written from the viewpoints of five young characters in bursts of arresting first-person narratives (often just a single paragraph; at most a page or two), this is edge-of-your-seat-stuff with the power to grip even the most distracted of readers. Though written as the characters recount the horrifying events at an inquest, those events unfold before readers’ eyes with unflinching descriptions of the atrocious attack and its aftermath, and with tremendous tension - we don’t know how this will end, or who ends up surviving. 

Threaded through with the characters’ overriding desire to support each other, and their will to survive, the novel makes important points about the incomprehensibility of such attacks - the “Why us?” question. As is often the case, such attacks could have happened someplace else, to other people. The message of this book is that what really matters is how we come through such events, how we emerge in a spirit of love, with a greater appreciation of life. As such, This Can Never Not Be Real is as much a valuable tool for dealing with traumatic events as it is a brutally gripping, thought-provoking page-turner.

Joanne Owen

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