Review: "Numb to This" by Kindra Neely

 

Numb to This by Kindra Neely
Published October 2022 by Little, Brown Ink
★★★★

This is a wonderful, painful take on trauma and its aftermath. It will resonate with a far, far wider audience than anyone would like to admit—because mass shootings are no longer rare, and neither are other mass attacks (half an hour after I finished reading this, I got a news notification on my phone about a mass stabbing). What disturbs me is not the content itself (that numbing effect at play...): what disturbs me is that I don't even remember the shooting Neely is talking about. There have been so many others.

What's so powerful about Numb to This, I think, is that it captures the sense of collective trauma as well as individual trauma...and also that Neely's story is not a standout one: she was there, she survived, she wasn't shot, her story isn't bloody or gory. It's numbing, and I'm so glad that there's never a question of whether or not this trauma is "valid." There are questions of how well Neely is or isn't handling the aftermath, and what her options are for processing, but there's never any question of how traumatic it is.

This is needed in school libraries.