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made an interesting discovery: what failed as poetry succeeded marvelously as prose. The capricious line breaks were annoying as hell, but Hopkins’ attempt to write something poem-shaped had the salutary effect of producing incredibly tight and evocative sentences, not a word wasted.

So much so that when her sister writes, telling Pattyn that their father has started beating his younger children, you fully expect that Pattyn is going to kick ass and take names.

I do demand that the plot twists, especially the drastic ones, be explicable upon careful re-examination of the story, and that tragic endings be justifiable, thematically, philosophically, geographically, whatever. Just so long as there’s a reason.

hey were great. Those two really gave me the teacher's point of view. A lot of the details that you see in that first chapter, on the shooting, came from either the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office (Columbine) or from those teachers. I also spoke to a young man named Kevin Braun, who was a survivor at Rocori. His best friend was killed that day, and he was in gym class with the other student who was killed. He had never talked about this with anyone. He says—as I imagine you have heard also—that kids who were there know that there are no words for what happened, and if you weren't there, you'd never understand anyway, so why bother?

In terms of the twist at the end, I often do that in my books. I'll have a twist, and I'll know it before I even write it. Because I need to be able to lay a paper trail for you throughout the book, so you can go back at the end and say, "What did I miss?" And of course, thematically, this twist is something you should be able to figure out.