The Hour I First Believed in 100+ Books in 2025

Dec 23, 2008 Dolly rated it really liked it

Shelves: germany-german, historical-fiction, education-school, other-usa, 2012, new-england

whoa.

I have to shake my head sometimes. I have the strangest coincidences in my reading selections and as random as I think they are, there must be some subconscious reason I choose to read them when I do. Here, for example, is the third book in a row in which Connecticut is mentioned significantly. That in of itself is startling to me; Connecticut is a small state and close to my home state of Maasachusetts. But I rarely read about it. While the main character doesn't go to prison in Connectic ...more

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Aug 07, 2009 Julia rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literary-ficton, best-book-i-read-in-2009, historical-fiction, contemporary-fiction, school-shootings

This is the fifth novel I’ve read about Columbine and it’s the best. It’s about what happened on April 20, 1999 but even more it’s about how one goes on afterward for the survivors. “A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.” His grandmother, great grandmother and aunt’s work- farm/ prison for women, his wife’s being sexually assaulted by her father as an 11 year old,(‘but he never touched me!’) his father’s alcoholism and suicide: Caelum Quirk wasn’t well and was comple This is the fifth novel I’ve read about Columbine and it’s the best. It’s about what happened on April 20, 1999 but even more it’s about how one goes on afterward for the survivors. “A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.” His grandmother, great grandmother and aunt’s work- farm/ prison for women, his wife’s being sexually assaulted by her father as an 11 year old,(‘but he never touched me!’) his father’s alcoholism and suicide: Caelum Quirk wasn’t well and was complex before Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris came to school with rifles and bombs where he taught English and his wife Maureen was a nurse. Maureen hid in a cabinet in the library during the shootings and can’t function afterward, gets addicted to drugs, they move back to Connecticut and the farm surrounded by the jail-- and then things really get bad for Maureen and Caelum. Caelum teaches a course on the Hero’s Journey at a community college and learns as much about it in teaching it and living it as his students do.

Oh and I loved all this history, his great grandmother's letters and diaries, her need to make the world a better place. And that for a time, his grandmother succeeded. His tenant's discovering of the history he couldn't be bothered with, his aunt's and family's secrets, which were literal skeletons in the closet.

“April 20, 1999. In the days, weeks, months and years, now since they opened fire, I have searched where I could for the whys, hows and whether- or- nots of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s rampage. They had been my students first, but I became theirs, stalking them so that I might rescue my wife from the aftermath of what they’d done. On that day, Maureen had escaped execution by opening a cabinet door and entering a maze –a many corridored prison whose four outer walls were fear, anger, guilt, and grief. And because I was powerless to retrieve her –because I, too, entered the labyrinth and became lost – my only option was to find its center, confront the two- headed monster who waited for me there, and murder it. Murder the murderers, who had already murdered themselves. You see what a puzzler it was? What a network of dead ends? Like I said, I was lost.”
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Jan 03, 2009 Sharon rated it really liked it

The Hour I First Believed is really 3 novels in one. All which are excellent. The first part begins with Caelum and Maureen (Mo) transition from Connecticut to Colorado and all that surrounds that. The middle section involves the Columbine disaster in 1999. Both are teachers at Columbine, but Mo is at the school the day it happens. Mo takes a tragic spiral downward effecting both of their lives, with the potential to destroy each. The third section almost becomes another book entirely, when a co ...more

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Jan 12, 2009 Heidi rated it liked it

Shelves: 2009-bookshelf

this book was no where near as good as his other two (his other two are classic modern literature~and possibly two of the best books written in my life time)....the main reason that it ended up getting its third star and almost a fourth was he did an excellent job tieing the ends together for a great ending.....this book was very long and had stuff in it that really didn't need to be in it~and had it been cut out would have gotten it a much better review from me....however as much as I disliked ...more

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Oct 30, 2009 Michelle Stie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Disturbing. Reading passages about Columbine were unsettling. I thought Lamb's discussion of violence in America to be one of the better treatments I've seen. ...more

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