Beth Nimmo

This is an interesting book by the parents of one of the first victims of the Columbine shooters. The parents do not want to portray Rachel Scott as a saintly religious cliché or as a sheer victim of a violent tragedy. Apparently the shooters had made videos of themselves as vigilante heroes taking revenge by shooting students at school. These videos were part of a school project and therefore seen by the teachers and students at the school. In one of their last videos before the shooting they named Rachel as one of their targets, apparently due to her Christian faith. Rachel had a very deep spiritual life and saw herself as struggling to make sense of her world as an adolescent who had doubts, not about God, but what type of attitude she should embrace as a Christian woman of faith. Part of the purpose of the book is for the parents to work through their grief issues and that is very evident as the book seems to be structured as the talks they gave to different groups over the years since Columbine. No one ever “gets over” losing their child. No one ever “gets over” losing a loved one. You just survive and learn to manage the feelings you have when grief and sorrow return to your already wounded heart. So Rachel worked at Subway after school and then had a regular church youth group that she attended after that. She was a really good girl. There was another tragedy the parents speak about after the Columbine shooting that is eerie. The Subway shop where Rachel worked was robbed and two workers were killed. The mother says that Rachel would have been working at Subway that day had she not been early killed. There is a sense of fatalism present in this expression by the parents and that itself is a form of dealing with the trauma of losing a child. It’s not logically a necessary fact that Rachel’s death was ultimately inevitable. I understand this type of thinking but it is harmful for a parent to entertain or harbor such thoughts. It turns God into the origin and cause of evil in the world, which he is not. Evil in the world is a mystery which is only answered by Christ’s own death and Resurrection. Letting parents verbalize and “vent” these feelings is necessary but always incomplete. This book was really powerful not because the parents wrote something outstanding but because they use some of Rachel’s own diary entries to show how powerful her belief was even when she had serious doubts about what God wanted her to do with her life.
The book talks about the other student who was shot with Rachel, Richard Castaldo. Castaldo originally said that there were words between Eric Harris with Scott defending her faith. He has apparently, since then, retracted that account of the day. Having worked with trauma victims I know that not everything said is accurate when the story can be checked by other evidence. But usually the first account of what happened to them, not the whole account, is the most-true account of what they’re experienced. This is because it involves their own point of view and not the whole chain of events. Someone may have actually convinced him after-the-fact that his actual recollections never happened, and he being traumatized, settled with another version, for whatever reason. I still believe Castaldo’s first version as Scott was named in one of the videos as a possible target for her religious belief, she was one of the first killed and she was hit in the head among other places by Eric Harris. Rachel Scott was a beautiful person inside and out and I'm happy to have happened upon this book about her faith experience and tragic death.… (mere)

It's difficult to give a book like this a low rating due to the subject matter.

Rachel Scott who tragically died in the Columbine school massacre, has been heralded as a martyr in this book. The author, Rachel's father, paints a picture of an almost saintly girl who inspired everyone around her and spent her time reaching out to the waifs and strays in American society. Some of the portrait may be true, there are certainly testimonies from those who were impacted by Rachel's life and witness. It is also clear that she had a sincere faith in God and was seeking to live her life according to His Will. We can be confident that she was a Christian and that she has gone to be with Jesus now.

It is really her parents and other people that let the side down somewhat. Their theology is questionable, and worrying as her father was a pastor...Having read the extracts from her diaries, I don't think Rachel herself would have wanted to be made into a saint. She was a normal teenage girl who was working out her faith on a daily basis. Her father claims that one of the gun-men asked her whether she believed in God and then shot her when she stood up for her faith. Other accounts have questioned this and suggested that she was smoking on the school field with a friend when she died.

Another friend suggested that Rachel wasn't trying to imitate Jesus or follow Him but was rather allowing Jesus to live through her and that this is what we should all be doing....I don't think this can be reconciled with Scripture. Her father also expresses some odd views about forgiveness stating that he would kill the offenders if he had the chance to get his daughter back. This might be an understandable emotional response for a parent, but from a Christian? There were other strange views expressed as well.

I found it difficult to really get into this as only one side of the picture of Rachel's life is presented and there is a lot of repetition as the parents give their own accounts of what happened and they are similar.

This book was okay, but not very objective. Rachel's diary entries alone may inspire some and challenge them, but maybe without the parents comments running alongside. We can all agree that it was a terrible tragedy for this family and others.

There is no overt bad language, but the author often uses the first letter of various swear words with the correct number of letters blanked out to allow a reader to figure out the word. This isn't helpful as a reader will hear the word in their mind. There are obviously violent scenes although they are not graphic and there is no graphic sexual content.
… (mere)