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Wow. Let me begin by saying that this book, quite relentlessly, ripped my heart out.

The jacket of Hate List asks some tough questions: “What if you wished someone would die and then it happened? What if the killer was someone you loved?” This book sets out to answer those questions, using the aftermath of a school shooting as the narrative vehicle.

Valerie and Nick were once inseparable. Both damaged and a bit angry at the world, they found refuge in one another. But Valerie didn’t know Nick as well as she thought she did. She never saw his final act of outrage coming, and the book makes it pretty clear that she will never stop paying for it. On a May morning, he came to school armed with a gun and began to target people from their “hate list.”

There isn’t a one-dimensional character to be found in this book. Everyone is flawed. Everyone is in unspeakable pain. Valerie must trudge through her senior year at a school that blames her for the shooting. And you can’t entirely blame the people who blame her. It was, after all, her list that Nick used when plotting his final act. But, as popular girl Jessica tells the police and her clique, Valerie “didn’t shoot anybody.” In fact, despite a long-standing feud between them, Valerie saved Jessica’s life during the shooting. She took a bullet in the leg, the last bullet Nick shot before turning the gun on himself.

The shooting itself, recapped throughout the book, was harrowing. But it was the ostracization of Valerie that actually got me choked up while reading. Her own parents believe the worst of her, and her father treats her like something scraped from the bottom of his shoe. (Quite frankly, I loathed her selfish jackass of a father from beginning to end.) She is invited to a party by Jessica, with whom she has forged a fragile friendship, where she is threatened at gunpoint by a classmate. Her lifelong best friend, Stacey, abandons her and is all too ready to believe the worst about her.

But there are characters who are supportive of Valerie, who are just as quick to believe the best about her as others are to believe the worst. There is Jessica, the girl who once made regular appearances on her hate list, the girl she saved. There is Bea, the artist who takes her under her wing and gives her a safe place for artistic expression. There is Dr. Hieler, her therapist, who is more of a father to her than her own father has ever been or will ever be. Even Briley, her father’s secretary-turned-lover, is supportive of Valerie when her own father is not.

There’s not much else I can say about this book, except the following: This is how you characterize. Make your characters something more than caricatures. It’s okay to let your protagonist be a little (or a lot) imperfect, or even sometimes unlikable. It’s okay to make a villain a little likable, to add layers rather than present some lazy, black-and-white cardboard cutout. It’s okay to try a little harder and give your story some depth.

In fact, it’s advisable.