"Inside her head, a sound like a school bell, the kind she hadn't heard in twenty years," writes Laura Leigh Morris in her gut-blistering novel The Stone Catchers. These words are the terrified thoughts of Donetta Freeman, a teacher who isn't trying to change the world, just to elevate her students' chances for a brighter future, until an active shooter upside-downs an entire community in an instant. No holds barred, Morris puts us inside the classroom, eyes pried open, ears hyperfocused, with the stink of sweat, blood, and sulfur, each of her characters testifying to the shattering effects of survivor trauma, but also to the power of even a sliver of hope. I want to send a copy to every politician. This book should be mandatory reading for all.
~Kari Gunter-Seymour, Ohio Poet Laureate, author of Dirt Songs
In The Stone Catchers, Laura Leigh Morris does the thing most Americans refuse to do: She stays with the victims of gun violence long after the twenty-four-hour news cycle has ended. She shows us how the trauma of a school shooting reverberates through a community—not just for the victims themselves, but for all those who feel the effects of their trauma. She does not let us do the thing we most want to do, what we do again and again, which is look away. She demands that we look. That we reckon. That we implicate ourselves in the violence that plays out far too often in our country.
~Neema Avashia, author of Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place
Laura Leigh Morris pulls her readers deep into a community experiencing generational tragedy and with eagle-eyed attention to the fine grain of human foible and capacity, charts the path through the tempest. In a world where on a daily basis we see our humanity reduced and our storytelling pinched, The Stone Catchers is a precious gift. Morris has given us a compelling, addictive narrative, shot through with a compassion validated by her unflinching gaze and measured, magisterial prose. The Stone Catchers is a marvel. Morris takes one of the toughest subjects to contemplate—a mass shooting—and in lucid prose limns how all of us are beset by pressure that results in questionable decisions. Morris unpacks what it is to be human, her deadly accuracy matched by her consummate delicacy.
~Robert Gipe, author of Pop: An Illustrated Novel
With The Stone Catchers, Laura Leigh Morris makes an unflinching picture of the debris field across an entire community when a student opens fire in a rural West Virginia college. These stories of gun violence litter our news feed. People use words like tragedy and horror; they'll talk about mental illness and second amendment rights—they'll create an idea of a problem that's complexly ingrained in American culture. But with this incisive, deeply human novel, told in many voices, Laura Leigh Morris gets at something beyond the words of it. The Stone Catchers is chilling, heart-rending, powerful, and true.
~Ashley Warlick, author of The Arrangement: A Novel
Laura Leigh Morris's THE STONE CATCHERS gloriously complicates the narrative of a school shooting. When an unarmed professor and three of her students save countless lives by killing the attacker, nothing in the tale that follows is a consolation—not the heroes' consciences, nor their status as heroes. As the shooting's aftershocks continue to ripple through their lives, it breaks loose all the terrible inertias already in place: the professor's waning marriage, her students' family struggles, and the ambitions thwarted by early pregnancy. Morris writes with a relentless commitment to Donnetta, Miller, Charlie, and Priscilla and to the specifics of this small Appalachian town. She asks what a shared act means to its separate actors, an exploration that makes THE STONE CATCHERS an enthralling, unflinching, refreshingly unsentimental read.
~Sarah Cypher, author of The Skin and Its Girl
