Book Review: We Can Be Heroes

We Can Be Heroes is absolutely not a perfect book, and if you have problems with it, I get it, but it was the book I needed right now, and I kind of loved it. It tackles unabashedly hard topics: gun control, abusive relationships, post-traumatic recovery, so trigger warnings left and right. But it uses these topics to construct a story about resilience, friendship, and social change that feels really important. (It’s definitely more appropriate for older/YA readers.)

Beck and Vivan lost their best friend in a school shooting that also permanently injured Vivian: Cassie’s ex-boyfriend, the son of the Bell Firearms CEO, shoots Cassie and then himself in the school cafeteria. Cassie had filed police reports on her ex’s escalating violence, but the police didn’t see the son of the town’s most important man as a real threat. Even now, people talk about “one bad decision” as though murdering your girlfriend is like deciding to drive your car downtown instead of taking the subway.

But Beck and Vivian — with the help of Cassie’s ghost — team up to create a series of public art pieces, highlighting maligned women from mythology, to keep Cassie at the front of people’s minds. A podcaster focused on women’s issues also comes to down to dig into the story behind the killing and the institutions and people who failed Cassie. I don’t know how we get from where we are to where we want to be, but art and asking hard questions is not a bad start.

(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.)

---