| Cassie
Bernall was just like any other 17-year-old; going to school, fighting
with her parents, getting ready for prom. Cassie was also a student at
Columbine High School, and name now equated with terrible violence. Cassie
was one of 12 students shot to death on April 20, 1999. Before her death,
the two killers asked her if she believed in God, and “She said yes”.
Misty Bernall, Cassie’s mom,
tells her daughter’s story from the time she was a child until that fateful
day. In middle school, Cassie got involved with the darker side of life,
hanging out with a bad crowd, listening to questionable music, smoking
pot, and fantasizing about killing her parents, even going so far as to
write about this. It was this writing that opened her parent’s eyes to
where Cassie was headed. They immediately pulled her out of her high school
and enrolled her in a private Christian academy, attempted to limit her
contact with her former friends and monitored every step she took. It wasn’t
easy – and Cassie fought them every step of the way. The Bernalls even
sold the house they’d lived in for years to get Cassie away from the kids
who continued to harass the family. The new house they purchased was practically
in Columbine High Schools’ backyard.
With love and determination,
they were finally able to help Cassie see that she’d been heading in the
wrong direction. Cassie joined her church’s youth group and made new friends,
and one weekend when she was allowed to go on a retreat with the church,
she was saved. She still had good days and bad days though, and she was
still struggling with her faith when the shootings occurred. The reader
feels both Cassie’s pain and the pain of her parents throughout the struggle,
and yet they feel a sense of hope that Cassie’s life had not been in vain.
(Colorado
Blue Spruce YA Book Award, 2003) |
