We Are All Columbine: 25 Years of Healing was a really interesting addition to the seemingly endless amount of material surrounding Columbine. Rather than focusing on the shooting itself, this looks at what came after… the survivors, families, community, and the ways people have spent the last 25 years living with something that can never really be left in the past.

I appreciated that it was less about retelling the events and more about the aftermath. There’s something particularly confronting about looking at Columbine a quarter of a century later and seeing how differently people have carried that experience with them. It also made me think about how much of the story we usually consume is centred around the perpetrators, while the people left behind have had to live with the consequences for decades.

It’s a relatively short read, but I think that works in its favour. It doesn’t try to sensationalise Columbine or uncover some dramatic new revelation. Instead, it’s a quieter look at grief, trauma, remembrance and healing, and at what it actually means for a community to move forward without ever truly moving on.

Not necessarily the most groundbreaking Columbine book I’ve read, but definitely one of the more reflective ones.