Mother's Reckoning (Klebold)

A Mother's Reckoning:  Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy
Sue Klebold, 2016
Crown / Archetype
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101902752


Summary
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-four others before taking their own lives.
 
For the last sixteen years, Sue Klebold, Dylan’s mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror?

And how, as his mother, had she not known something was wrong? Were there subtle signs she had missed? What, if anything, could she have done differently?
 
These are questions that Klebold has grappled with every day since the Columbine tragedy. In A Mother’s Reckoning, she chronicles with unflinching honesty her journey as a mother trying to come to terms with the incomprehensible.

In the hope that the insights and understanding she has gained may help other families recognize when a child is in distress, she tells her story in full, drawing upon her personal journals, the videos and writings that Dylan left behind, and on countless interviews with mental health experts.
 
Filled with hard-won wisdom and compassion, A Mother’s Reckoning is a powerful and haunting book that sheds light on one of the most pressing issues of our time. And with fresh wounds from the recent Newtown and Charleston shootings, never has the need for understanding been more urgent.
 
All author profits from the book will be donated to research and to charitable organizations focusing on mental health issue. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1948
• Raised—Columbus, Ohio, USA
• Education—Ohio State University
• Currently—Colorado


Sue Klebold is the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two shooters at Columbine High School in 1999 who killed 13 people before ending their own lives, a tragedy that saddened and galvanized the nation.

Susan came from a prominent family in Columbus, Ohio, the granddaughter of a philanthropist who build the local Jewish community center that bears his name. She and her husband Tom met at Ohio State University where both were art students. They married in 1971. Tom was eventually hired as a geophysicist for an oil company in Denver, Colorado, and Susan has worked as both a counselor at Arapahoe and Colorado Community Colleges. In 1990 the couple established Fountain Real Estate Management to oversee their rental properties.

Sue Klebold has spent the last 15 years excavating every detail of her family life, and trying to understand the crucial intersection between mental health problems and violence. Instead of becoming paralyzed by her grief and remorse, she has become a passionate and effective agent working tirelessly to advance mental health awareness and intervention. (Adapted from the publisher and Denver Post. Retrieved 2/21/2016.)

Book Reviews
[Sue Klebold] earns our pity, our empathy and, often, our admiration; and yet the book’s ultimate purpose is to serve as a cautionary tale, not an exoneration. Klebold seems to have written the book for yet another reason: to communicate with the families of the victims.... One has the eerie sense of bearing witness, in that moment, to the most intimate of communications. This is writing as action, bursting from a life so choked by circumstance that she could express that sentiment only from within the safety of a 300-page book.
Susan Dominus - New York Times Book Review


The author, whose son Dylan was one of two shooters who massacred 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in 1999, uses recollections, journals, and the profoundly disturbing writings and video recordings he left behind to reconstruct events and ask hard questions: Why did Dylan go so very wrong? And what could she have done?
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for A Mother's Reckoning...then take off on your own.

1. How does this book come across to you? What does Sue Klebold say her motivation was in writing A Mother's Reckoning? Does she fulfill her goal?

2. "A mother is supposed to know," Klebold has said. To what extent is she right? How much are parents supposed to know? How much can they be expected to know? If children are aware that their parents routinely search their rooms, won't they simply find better hiding places?

3. Talk about the trajectory of Dylan Klebold from Sue's "sunshine boy" to troubled, deadly killer. Was there any point when the Klebolds might have stepped in, where they might have—or should have—recognized something was amiss with Dylan, something seriously amiss?

4. How much sympathy do you accord to Sue and Tom Klebold? Has your attitude toward them changed after reading this book? Were any myths about the Klebolds dispelled, or misunderstandings clarified?

5. Should A Mother's Reckoning have been written? Should it have come out before this time? Or never at all?

6. Can you put yourself in Sue and Tom Klebold's place? Or is that simply to hard to contemplate?

7. School bullying has always been an troublesome element of childhood and adolescence. How has Columbine changed society's attitude t
oward bullying? What are the ways in which we're dealing with bullying? Are they effective?

8. What were the differences, according to Klebold, between her son Dylan and Eric Harris?

(Questions issued by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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