An interesting read of a mothers account of what happened before and after the tragedy of the columbine school shooting in 1999 when 2 boys opened fire shooting several people. This book is written by one of the shooters mother, and looks at mental illness and how they family coped with the aftermath.
A very insightful book.

As soon as I saw this book I knew I had to read it. This is a book written by the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine High School shooters. She writes thoughtfully and passionately about her thoughts and feelings throughout the 16 years since the incident happened.

After the incident Sue and her family were blamed for what Dylan did. As she says in the book, if she was an outsider then she would blame the family too. Dylan had a happy childhood and despite some minor problems in his teenage years, as far as the family were aware there was nothing for them to be concerned about.

This book is primarily a memoir however it is split into two parts – the first half describes with detail the day of the incident and works back through Dylan’s childhood. Sue doesn’t shy away from discussing some of the issues and fall outs her family had. Leading up to the day of the incident, Dylan does become quieter and spends more time on his computer. But his mother doesn’t see this as any source of concern as it is just stereotypical teenage behaviour. Among other things she assumes it’s nerves as Dylan is preparing to leave for college.

The second part of the book is still memoir but wrapped around every moment is insight into suicide research. Sue has now devoted her life to pushing for more research into helping people with mental illness (or brain illness as she refers to it) in order to prevent incidents such as these. She realises that signs she had ignored are actually signals of depression in teenagers but they’re not widely known and hard to distinguish between typical teenage behaviour. Even scarier still is that Dylan actively seemed to be getting better. But Sue has since learned that it’s common for people with depression, and even those planning suicide, to hide their true feelings and to even make future plans – such as going to college.

I had never read a lot of information on Columbine but hearing the thoughts of someone so close to one of the shooters, attempting to rationalise and understand what her son did is admirable. The work she has done since in aid of promoting research and encouraging more is fantastic. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in finding out more about Columbine without the media sensationalism. Or just people (especially parents) who want to understand more about depression and other mental illness in young people.

Thanks to Netgalley, publishers and author for this the chance to review this book.

I have to be honest I didn't know a lot about Columbine before I read this. I was in my early twenties when it happened, and although the shock waves reverberated around the world it seemed impossible it could happen here. And like so many others I wondered where were parents, and how could they not know. What kind of parents were they? What seems a lifetime later and now a parent myself I'd like to say I wasn't so judgemental but I'd be lying.

So confession time. I requested this book by accident. Normally I would never have chosen to read it. But now I think if we could create a curriculum for parents this would have to be required reading. I've never read a book so truthful and so profoundly affecting as Sue Klebolds account of the time before and after her sons involvement in the Columbine shootings. She makes no excuses for herself or her son and tells the story so honestly it's actually sometimes painful to read. And in reading it I realised despite my own experiences of depression and actually recognising some of the ways Dylan Klebold behaved in the 2 years before his death in my own behaviour at different points in my life I wouldn't have realised there was anything going on. So whilst this cannot be called an enjoyable read it's one that has left a mark on me. Which I think was the idea.

I can't say I enjoyed this book, that wouldn't be fair. It deals with events too horrific to imagine. But as a mother of a son the same age as Dylan this book terrified me. How well can you know your child, when they're going through the many and turbulent changes adolescence brings? Sue is a brave woman to share her story with the world, and I hope it was cathartic for her. Not being American, I am aware of school shootings but not in any detail of individual ones. I'd heard of Columbine but didn't remember the detail. It's now etched on my memory for ever. I felt for Sue and Tom all the way through it and shared her tears. Dylan seemed like a typical teenager, although it seemed he displayed asperger's tendencies. Easy to overlook when the young person seems to be coping. And so easy in hindsight to look back and say that tackling any of the issues displayed would have changed events. Sue, I'm sure many parents hugged their own kids a little more in reading your story, and I don't believe anyone could condemn you for raising your son in a normal run of the mill household. Who knows what trigger changes a young person's path in life? Hidden bullying is so damaging that any gesture of friendship, however toxic, can seem like a lifeline. To deal with a child's suicide is a horror too great to contemplate, but this - well. I cried with you, I examined my own relationship with my son, and I prayed. God bless, and thank you for sharing your story.

A fascinating and terrifying insight into the lives of the Klebolds. It is a book which is difficult to read due to the tragic nature of the circumstances. At the same time, I think it has the potential to be a helpful read for many parents.

When I first received this book from Netgalley for a honest review I thought I wouldn't like Sue Klebold. How could I like a woman whose son committed such a terrible act! Sue's son, Dylan was one of the gunmen in the Columbine School shooting in 1999. How wrong I was! I felt so sorry for her, not only had she lost her son, Dylan committed suicide, but she had to cope with the terrible realisation that Dylan was a murderer. As a mother myself I cannot imagine her pain. She had no chance to ask him why or begin to understand what had driven him to carry out such a horrible act. Sue constantly tortured herself with guilt, was she a bad mother? Why didn't she notice something was wrong? Can we ever really know another person? And whose fault is it when our children go wrong?

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy and to Sue Klebold. I hope she's found some form of peace.

Sue Klebold is the mother of one of the Columbine Shooters. In A Mother’s Reckoning she looks back at her time raising Dylan Klebold, exploring behaviours and discussing both the lead up to and the aftermath of the shooting, as well as bringing to front her own research and work on the causes of such tragedies.

This book was an incredibly powerful read – I found myself thinking about it when I wasn’t reading it and long after it had finished. The confusion and grief over what happened projects clearly from the pages, while each word is a careful examination of everything that unfolded before, during and after the shooting. Klebold does not stray away from the darker details, or tries to shield herself. She explores her own actions in raising Dylan, trying desperately to find out why the boy she thought she knew turned out to be someone else entirely.

More than that, however, she uses the book to highlight what to look out for in young people who could be depressed or in danger of suicide, in the hopes it could prevent further grief. Klebold goes into a lot of detail about the research she has done surrounding the role of mental health in these kinds of tragedies, from attending events to meeting with psychologists and other experts who can shed even the slightest bit of insight. The research isn’t at an end either and Klebold will be donating all her profits from the sale of this book to charity and research focusing on mental health issues.

However, the book itself is not a complete breakdown of what happened and why. We will never truly know the complete reasoning behind the two boys’ actions, but it does help answer some questions and give a small glimpse into the horrors that all those who were connected in any way to the shootings would have experienced. There are sections which do feel like they’re missing something and the book only really focuses on Dylan, as would be expected. I, for one, would be interested to read an account from Harris’ own family to see if there were any similar behaviour changes between the two, or if their experiences with him were any different, especially given that, while Dylan was marked out as depressed, experts believe Eric to have had psychopathy.

That being said, this book is a compelling memoir, one which captures the grief and horror of a mother who discovers her son has both died and killed on the same day, while also taking a look at the reasons why such a tragedy occurred, shedding light on something which is prevalent even today. It’s a personal project by a woman who could have easily shied away from the public eye, but instead used her bravery to face her critics and talk about something that obviously means a lot to her, in the hope it will help save someone else. It’s a book that I would recommend reading if you are even the slightest bit interested in mental health, or even if you’re not. It is easily one of my top reads of the year, despite being difficult to take in at times, and I will still be thinking of it for days, weeks and months to come.

I started this book just before Christmas and had to read it in small chunks ever since. It’s a tough read and broke my heart on every page.

I don’t normally read more than one book at a time but I needed to punctuate this book with some lighter stuff because it was dragging me down into depression. There’s a trigger warning for you right there: take caution in reading this book if you suffer from depression or suicidal thoughts.


This book is the heart wrenching memoir by the mother of a high school shooter. Sue Klebold was an ordinary mother, she was attentive and involved in her son’s everyday life but she didn’t pick up on the subtle signs which could have shown her what her son was planning.

Dylan’s parents had no idea that he was suicidally depressed for years before he took catastrophic action, and I for one believe that there’s no way they could have known without specialist advice. Unless you’re looking at your loved ones and specifically for signs of suicidal or homicidal thoughts, how would you spot those signs? How many of us look at children and wonder if they’re thinking about killing themselves or others?


Klebold uses the term ‘brain health’ a lot in this book rather than ‘mental health’ and makes an excellent point: the term 'brain health' sounds a lot more physical and grounded in fact, even though they mean the same thing.

This book packs a hell of a punch and does discuss tragedy, grief, depression and suicide in great but essential detail.

Sue Klebold has not written this book for financial gain, donating all proceeds to brain health charities. She hasn’t written it to protest her innocence or to beg forgiveness, she’s poured her heart out on a page to tell other people what the signs were that she’d missed in her own son and overall:

‘Anyone can be suicidal. Don’t assume that you and your loved ones are safe, so educate yourself and be aware of the people around you.’

This book will stay with me for a long long time ..... I have always been intrigued by the notorious Columbine event and this book takes you into a complete other side of the story from the mothers point of view. How would you react if your son - who you loved more than life itself - was one of the shooters .... A real eye opener making you think about our relationships, kids depression are there signs ?,but never forgetting whatever frightful acts your child has carried out they are still your child. Highly recommend this book

I’m really conflicted about this book. My heart goes out to Sue Klebold, of course it does, I can’t even begin to imagine the agony she has been through. And I’m certainly not in the blame game – who of us can say we have never made any mistakes with our parenting? I found the book both compelling and often moving – but at the end I’m not sure I was any wiser than I was at the beginning. And nor, I feel, is Sue Klebold herself. In part this book is an act of self-exoneration and in part an attempt to find easy answers. Neither of which aims are really fulfilled. Many reviewers have commented that this is a “brave” book. I’m not convinced by that. Sue Klebold obviously felt the need to write it and I sincerely hope it helped her. But whether it makes her son’s crime any the easier to understand I rather doubt. He acted in a cruel and vicious way and I didn’t feel that I understood him to any greater degree by the end of the book. In my mind there is no exoneration possible and to talk about “brain health” as she does seems to fudge the issues. Riveting reading, nevertheless.

A very difficult book to read not only for the content but for the obvious pain within the chapters of this book.
How could this happen, under the noses of their family and friends, this horror happened and they had no clue. A mother likes to think that she knows her children inside out but sadly this isn't true. Sue Klebold writes with all the pain that has followed her since the day of this tragedy, all the fear that she missed something that could have stopped this from happening.
Moving and blatantly honest

A powerful book that made quite difficult reading. It seems very wrong to say that I "enjoyed" this book but how I admire the author's courage for putting her thoughts and feelings in print with such amazing honesty

Here is my confession: I would not have read this book if I had known it was a memoir by the mother of one of the shooters. That would have been a mistake and I am humbled by my assumption that Sue must have known something was wrong with her son and did nothing. I would not describe this as a happy book but it is heart-breaking and made me cry from start to finish. I started to read A Mother’s Reckoning on New Year’s and was crying before I’d read more than a few pages. Sue does not make excuses for her son’s actions but tries to understand them and make us understand as well. Dylan was not the monster he was initially painted to be but a boy with mental health problems who was not in his right stare of mine when he did a terrible thing. Sue is braver than I’d have been in the circumstances. She admits that she is not without blame because her and her husband misinterpreted signs that Dylan was falling apart and, understandably runs through a million scenarios in her mind when she saves him and the Columbine victims. A Mother’s Reckoning is hard to read at times especially when Sue summarises what happened that awful day at Columbine. I found the statistics of suicides among teenagers shocking. A Mother’s Reckoning is not a good book, it is an incredibly moving memoir that wrecked me.

Gripping, terrifying, heart breaking. How Sue Klebold found the strength and courage to write this book I cannot imagine. Mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine shooters, it's clear that Klebold has wanted to share her knowledge, feelings, shame, guilt and deep, deep sorrow for a long time. Depositions, court cases and sealed findings have left her mute and as a result, the writing is almost at break neck speed as it gathers momentum.

Klebold shares her stories of Dylan as a toddler, as a young boy and as a loving son, but there is no self-indulgence here. She is clear about the unforgivable crime he committed and that, whatever happened at school regarding a pervasive culture of bullying, this cannot and must not be seen as justification for her son's actions. She also shares journal entries which document an ordinary family life with a sometimes truculent but mostly sensitive typically teenage boy. Despite the blame and anger aimed at Klebold and her husband's parenting, realistically, could anyone have predicted what Dylan was capable of? Mere days before,the massacre he was videoed jokingly throwing snowballs at his dad and letting his prom date pin a buttonhole on him. What parent can honestly say they know everything that is going on in their child's life, their head, their heart?

Although she does not court pity in the book, I feel very deeply for this woman. She lost her son and yet, even now, with meticulous research that maybe points to mental health issues, she cannot write a sentence about how she misses him and grieves for him without clarifying how many more innocents have also been left grieving, hurt and devastated.

It is a terrible legacy that her much loved son has left her with and one that she will never be able to relinquish. I suspect she does not want to - she keeps the victims and their families firmly front and centre of her writing. Klebold has consulted much respected academics regarding everything from the anatomy of violence to spotting signs of suicide and self harm and the book is peppered with references to research and findings. She has also dedicated her life to support groups and conferences and panels where she shares her story and her increasing knowledge. I suspect this is not only the intellectualisation of the crime but the restitution, the life sentence she feels she owes her son's victims.

This book is anything but an easy read. The chapter dealing with the actual shooting was incredibly traumatic and I had to put the book down for a while. What it is though, is honest and raw and a salutary lesson that should maybe be compulsory reading for those living and working with teens. Klebold understands the vitriol that is still aimed at her parenting of Dylan, as do I. As she says - I would feel the same.

This must have been a very hard book to write; also to read and review, but I hope you found it therapeutic. I don't believe there was any need to strenuously attempt to exonerate yourself from blame as there were many unknown factors that triggered this incident. One can only speculate in hindsight and never know for sure. Sadly, we live in a society where people feverishly try to apportion blame to find the answers to impossible questions. If your son had killed or injured my child I would never find it in my heart to forgive him. This however would not spill over to your family. I wouldn't conduct a witch hunt or send hate mail. Healthy minds don't consider such things. It's a disgrace that people ostracised your family. It's also wrong to jump to the harsh conclusion that parents are necessarily responsible for the actions of their children. Parents are not mind readers and from what I have read your son was very skilful in hiding his inner thoughts and feelings. I also criticise the media circus who insensitively ramped it up time and time again. I am no expert but my take on the tragedy is that Eric Harris was a psychopath; the planner of this event. He was charming and persuasive which fits the bill and peer influence is strong. I think he systematically brainwashed your son and hyped him up to a state of rage that Dylan couldn't handle because it was alien to his upbringing, long held values and beliefs. Eric Harris may have been adept at finding his Achilles' heel which appear to be against blacks, jocks and children who taunted them as fags and used these to accelerate his anger so he could use him to carry out the school carnage. For Harris I believe it was for an insatiable need for control, power and notoriety. I'm not convinced your son was depressed or suicidal and unsure whether to take his journal ramblings seriously. He may have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol or had a bad day when he wrote about suicide. Nonetheless he perceived his world as going down hill with his grades sliding, the brush with the law & its consequences and his belief that he couldn't attract a girl. I think he was close to apathy about his existence and his self esteem was damaged. This was probably only a temporary feeling. Someone who is dangerously depressed is reclusive, weepy, sleeps a lot and neglects his hygiene. His statement that he didn't like his life too much suggests a pretty typical teenager and if he could have coped with those bad times (that temporary blip) and risen above it all could have been so different. I think he felt downcast and worthless but St John's Wort is only for low mood and mild depression. The tragedy is that nobody bothered to check out exactly what Harris was doing in that basement. I hope you will find peace and dwell on the son you knew and not the "stranger" who committed those atrocities.

I received this book from netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book got me fascinated with the Columbine massacre. I've watched a lot of YouTube today...

I didn't love the book. Which is kinda hard to say as it's a true story. Being true... it isn't fast paced. No twists. No unknown endings... which is what helps turn the pages.

That being said the insight into the life of a mother who 'raised a murderer' was brilliant. I can't imagine the emotions you'd go through, and the blame to deal with from all directions including yourself.

Strong lady. This book has a place with the historical event. It just isn't a page turner for me.

But sue, you are inspirational.

I don't know where I could possibly begin to do justice to the act of bravery which this book represents. This is by no means an easy read but an essential one if you are to have the smallest inkling of how a mother tries to cope with not only the loss of her son but the loss of her trust in him, herself and everything she thought she knew about her life.

I can't imagine how it must feel to be so hated and pilloried by millions, helpless to explain herself and helpless to atone for what her child did. Throughout the book I kept pausing, imagining how I would have reacted or wanted to react, and each time, hit the same wall Sue Klebold did - she couldn't do anything. She couldn't contact the families of the victims, partly for legal reasons and partly because she recognised how unwelcome her very existence would be to them. She couldn't apologise because in the end, what use would that be to the parents of murdered children? She couldn't accept the blame (though she tries) because as the book makes clear, she didn't know what was happening in Dylan's head and even if she was guilty of wilful ignorance, an admission of that won't return the lost. Consumed by guilt, she loses everything - her health, her marriage, her sense of worth, her image of the boy she raised as a happy child.
What she does, with this book, is lay bare her life, opening it to scrutiny in a manner few of us could tolerate, in the only way she knows how to honour those who were killed at Columbine.
I, like so many, assumed that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were the product of something very wrong at home, at school, perhaps in American society at large, with its guns and its social/racial divisions. Having read A Mother's Reckoning, I see a bigger picture - possibly an even scarier one, unless the lessons the author offers are heeded. Most of all, I finished the book, quite overwhelmed with how Sue Klebold has, against all odds, made something worthwhile out of something so bleak.

In 1999 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine School in Colorado and gunned down a teacher and twelve students and injured another twenty four before taking their own lives..

When these facts became available to the world, I and many others I'm sure, certainly the press, believed, somewhat complacently, that Harris and Klebold must have led lives sadly lacking in discipline and/or love, and probably had disinterested parents who too carried guns, of course the parents must have been to blame. Whilst reading this book I came face to face with my own smugness.

Sue Klebold has left no stone unturned as she has grappled over the ensuing years with the fact that her loving son, whom she loved deeply could have become a perpetrator of such a heinious crime. She never flinches from any guilt or responsibility as she works her way through details of their family life and the disbelief that they were caught up in such a situation.

As a parent who has brought up sons I was well aware that they can be a law unto themselves and often have secrets which we are unaware of but reading this account has led me to believe that for most of us it is a case of there but for the grace of God...

Although it eventually led to the demise of her marriage Sue Klebold has tirelessly revisited her journals leading up to that time, looked deep within her heart and spoken to mental health experts working passionately to bring her findings into the public arena in her hope that teenage depression can be recognised by parents, teachers and doctors and effectively dealt with so that school murder/suicides can be stopped before they become a reality..

"All author profits from the book will be donated to research and to charitable organizations focusing on mental health issues." and I believe that this compelling and haunting book should be required reading if not for all parents then for teachers and even mental health experts..