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I'm quite a bit frustrated by this book. First, the art, page layout and writing are so influenced by Chris Ware as to be totally distracting. And as with Ware, I find that the tiny pictures distance me from the story, and the characters, with their expressionless faces and often unexpressed inner thoughts, are nearly ciphers.

The first half of the story seems determined to show how mundane life can be for people looking in from the outside of other people's tragedy. I felt a little meta as I gazed into the book dispassionately at one character dispassionately gazing at another experiencing great personal loss. I recognized the awkwardness within myself of dealing with such events, but still found it a bit tedious to read.

Around the midpoint, the creator introduces a talk radio program that ties the events of this story into the false flag conspiracy theories that assert the government is staging the Sandy Hook shooting and other massacres as part of a strategy to take away the rights of American Citizens. I believe this is the first time I have seen this issue addressed in a work of fiction, and it really started to make my blood boil as I thought how the suffering of the loved ones of victims is being negated and even criminalized in the minds of people who see the grieving as bad actors in a vast conspiracy.

If the first part is how we detach ourselves from tragedy, the second part addresses how we can go overboard trying to insert ourselves into the tragedy: constantly hitting refresh hoping for new tidbits or insights, overanalyzing, spreading rumors, becoming trolls, growing paranoid, spiraling into doomsday scenarios.

Having gotten me riled up, the story cannot offer me any really satisfying conclusion. The world is what it is, terrifying and mundane, and the characters move on with varying degrees of hope and/or despair.

I ultimately land on a thumbs up for the book, but I must admit that that may well be due to the fact that I used to live in Colorado Springs in the same neighborhood where much of the book is set. Hey, I said we all need to somehow insert ourselves into the story.