Oliver Loving: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of January 2018: They say great fiction has the power to increase one’s empathy, and Stefan Merrill Block’s Oliver Loving does just that. In it, a school shooting compels the denizens of a small Texas town to confront painful (and sometimes ugly) truths, as they try to solve the mystery of why the shooter did what he did. Trouble is, many of the answers are locked inside the mind of one of the victims, Oliver Loving--who is in a coma--and his unrequited love, Rebekkah Sterling, who would just as soon forget. Block does a deft job of capturing the reverberating effects of grief, and the many ways in which it is expressed. You may not always agree with how Loving’s mother, father, and brother deal with the horrible hand their family is dealt, but you understand their actions just the same (and maybe even relate to them). Oliver Loving is a compassionate account of something we see far too often on the news, but never get the full story. And though you’ll need to suspend your disbelief for certain aspects of this narrative, I think it’s much harder to wrap one’s brain around the sorts of real-life tragedies that inspired it. By giving a glimpse inside the mind of both perpetrator and victim, by putting us in their shoes, maybe we can better tease out why such terrible things happen, and take meaningful steps to stop them. --Erin Kodicek, Amazon Book Review