Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton

I loved Sister and Afterwards so looking forward to this! Thanks for the review!
Nat

I've just finished and here in my review:

I'm not totally sure that I can put my feelings towards this book into words, but my gosh it had my heart racing!

Told in what feels like real time, each chapter being a time frame within the three hours, we flick between the children, teachers and police as they race against time to stop the gunmen from succeeding in their mission.

The book also deals with a lot of big topics other than school shootings, which I won't go into for fear of spoilers, but it definitely made me think of reactions to news stories over the last few years.

The plot was fast paced and enough bread crumbs were dropped for me to guess at some of the goings on, but this didn't dull my reading experience, if anything it heightened it as I waited with baited breath to find out if I was correct.

Having read and loved Sister, I couldn't wait to get my hands on this book, so thank you to the publisher for gifting this to me in exchange for an honest review.

I think the right-wing newspaper headlines included from Express, Mail  , Torygraph, Sun and so on were real, as were the quotes from Hatie Hopkins, Tr*mp etc. Very sad the hate that some of the public have swallowed. 

What a tremendous novel though, a brilliantly told story, totally gripping. Agree about reading it in the fewest sittings possible if you can, although very emotionally hard hitting so steel yourself...

Edited from what I wrote on Goodreads (spoilers removed), the TL;DR version is that I thought this was well-written and well worth the read!

This book was amazing in more ways than one: It has a good, solid premise and the storytelling gripped me right from the start. I’m not actually sure what I expected with this one, but it definitely wasn’t what I got. I’m so glad I started this during the holiday season, so was able to spend long chunks of time reading and finished it quickly.

Fully agree with what Wendy said above: I was really rooting for the students throughout and wanted to see if things managed to work out for them. Some of the other reviews I read have mentioned too many characters in this one, and although there are quite many I didn't really find myself in any character mix-up issues, I thought the author did a great job in giving the different students (well, the main ones at least) such strong distinguishing characters from one another. Probably also helped that I read this in 3 sittings, and wasn't reading anything else alongside. I thought the different points of view was quite refreshing (in the literary sense, not in the sense of what was actually taking place in the school), as the different emotions were so effectively conveyed. A part of me wishes that the shooters’ point-of-view was included as well (from a first-person perspective), but I guess that would have taken another level of skill to write in seamlessly with what was going on here. I especially liked the library scene as I thought that captured the most diversity of emotions although they were all in the same room.

Two relatively minor (and specific) things let it down slightly for me, but I won't elaborate on here as it gives too much away. As a whole though, I found this a very unique book, and a compelling read, so 5 stars from me.