Monday, Monday

“How could he put into words what it was like to hold someone who was bleeding to death?” wonders a character in Crook’s (The Raven’s Bride) intensely imagined novel. Crook focuses on the impact of one of the first mass murders in U.S. history—Charles Whitman’s tower shootings at the University of Texas. Shelly is a student at UT in 1966. One fateful, yet utterly ordinary day, she is crossing the campus plaza when a bullet from Whitman’s rifle hits her, knocking her to the sizzling Texas concrete, where it seems certain that she’ll bleed to death. But two other students, cousins named Jack and Wyatt, take it upon themselves to rescue her and other students from the wide-open plaza. From then on, Shelly and Wyatt’s lives will intersect in ways they don’t anticipate. The story unfurls simply and smoothly, with a quiet insistence much like the path the characters will take. Crook renders Shelly’s interior life delicately and fully, and artfully conveys her many moments of panic and anguish. (May)