ENDGAME
Nancy Garden
Harcourt Children's Books
Fiction
ISBN: 0152054162
304 pages

"It's my hope that Gray's story will help both kids and adults think seriously about bullying, and realize that stopping bullying needs to be a priority in our schools. I also hope that it will perhaps lead some readers to empathize with Gray --- and to thereby understand that people of any age who strike out at others have often been victims themselves."
- Nancy Garden

Nancy Garden is the recipient of the 2003 Margaret A. Edwards Award --- an honor that celebrates an author's lifetime contribution in writing for young adults. She has published more than 30 books, and her latest novel, ENDGAME, is one of her best yet. Moved by the horrific events that transpired at Columbine, Garden responded by writing a novel that gets inside the head of a young boy like Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold (the Columbine shooters) and attempts to explain both the "how" and the "why" behind his irreparable actions. Intensely powerful, heartbreaking and frighteningly relevant, ENDGAME should be made required reading and discussed in both classrooms and at home.

The novel opens with 15-year-old Gray Wilton (he was 14 at the time of the shooting) sitting in his cell in a juvenile detention center. His lawyer is interviewing him in preparation for the trial in order to get his side of the story of the events that transpired. As the conversation progresses, Sam Falco (Gray's lawyer) pokes and prods Gray with questions, and Gray answers them as if he has nothing to lose. He killed four of his classmates and is proud of his accomplishments. What is the point of holding anything back just because he was caught before he could blow his own brains out like he originally planned?

As Gray relays the details of the weeks/months leading up to the shooting, readers are given a fly-on-the-wall's view of the relentless torture and humiliation that he was forced to endure both at his new school and at home. Ever since he could remember, Gray had been the object of teasing by boys who were older and bigger than him. At Greenford High, the situation was no different. Zorro and Johnson, two of the star players for the Varsity football team, picked him out immediately and proceeded to make fun of him, push him around, and beat him up just for the fun of it (including the time they forced him to drink black paint and when they tried to force him to give his friend oral sex in the locker room shower). They went so far as to destroy Gray's cherished drums (though Gray could never prove it) and run over his beloved dog, Barker, while out joy-riding one night with friends. Although Gray tried to "take it" at first, Zorro and his meathead friends clearly pushed Gray to the breaking point.

At home, circumstances weren't any better. His older brother, Peter, was picture-perfect and idolized by his father as the son he'd always wanted to have. His mother was basically a wallflower --- nice and semi-supportive of Gray but spineless when it came to standing up to her husband (mostly in matters concerning Gray). His father was ultra-critical of him, irked by his passion for music ("Music's a frill; music's not going to get him a job or the right friends no matter how much he likes it or how good he is at it!") and quite obviously disappointed in him because he wasn't more like Peter. As for his father's response to Gray's being bullied: "Like I told you back at Parker, there are bullies everywhere. What you have to do is not give anyone any reason to bully you...Go out for a sport like your brother...Let it be known that you're tough...Tell the guys that you hunt with me and Pete...Laugh it off...But if it gets really bad, fight back. Give as good as you get, but with fists, Gray. That's all any real guy really needs." As if laughing it off or joining the basketball team is a viable solution to bullying.

By the end of Gray's version of the story, readers will be horrified by what he has had to endure and disgusted by the fact that no one stepped in to help him, especially his parents. How could life get so complicated for a boy that young? Why did he have access to his father's semi-automatic in the first place? Why did the media paint him as subhuman, "an angry loner addicted to violence in the form of shoot-em-up video games, hunting, archery, and the loud, pulsating music he often played on his drums," when in reality he hated hunting, was passionate about any kind of music, and was in desperate need of someone to believe in him?

ENDGAME is a brutally honest and disquieting commentary on how off-the-mark authority figures (including family members) can be. The story that Garden tells is fictional but one that mirrors what is possible in today's violent, finger-pointing society. In the end, we realize that it is not so much Gray who is to blame for the shooting, but each and every one of us who refuses to spend the time to understand how and why such horrors occur and what we can do to stop them from happening again.

   --- Reviewed by Alexis Burling

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