What If?: A Tale of Bullying, Suicide, and Looking the Other Way
This is a very harsh book about the reality of bullying and how people react to it. Madison and Abby are best friends who go to the same school as Claire. Claire is the one who is target of bullying. There are ten instances given in the book and these range from physical (such as pushing her down in the snow), cyberbullying, verbal and sexual abuse (via posting a pic of Claire in the girls' locker room in a top and her panties.)
What ties these in together is that Madison has seen each and every one of these actions (or the pic photo of the locker room) and in each instance she passes by and fails to help Claire or says nothing when she's not personally present at the abuse.
The abuse has a price and Claire kills herself. The reaction of the students is most interesting as a good number of them now are upset about what happened yet not a one of them had tried to befriend Claire. The main bullies (one male and one female) ignore the whole thing.
In the end Claire is given a choice in an interesting way; go along with what has been happening to Claire as she did before or stop and say something to her abusers, stand up for Claire and befriend her.
The ending of the book is also different are really good. This is a very dark book but is one of the best ones I have read about the subject of bullying.
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