Amberside is a small town with not much fame to claim. At least before that night anyway.

Each year a festival called Ambereve is held, bringing hundreds of Amberside residents together at a concert in the grounds of a local tourist attraction, historic Hearne House.

The bonfire is lit and local bands and an old rocker called Eric Stone are on stage as usual, but what happens next is anything but expected.

Shots ring out. Screams fly through the air. People turn, run, and some of them… too many, fall.

There is more than one shooter, and no-one knows the safest direction to flee.

Five teens are part of the festival. Most are concert goers, and one is high in the rigging above the stage. Horrified, Peaches can see what’s happening in the crowd below her. She knows she has to get down. All a shooter needs to do is look up and she’ll be trapped.

17 yr old Joe is with his best mates Sam and Doug. Only moments before, they were admiring a tall blond girl swaying to the music. Her sequined dress is short and as eye catching as she is. Everyone knew her name. Ellie is a teen model and an accomplished athlete.

Violet is with her mum and little brother at the concert. They are separated in the panic and chaos, leaving Violet wondering if they are still alive.

March seems the calmest of all, thinking ahead and saving Peaches’ life after she climbs down from the lighting rigging and under the stage to hide. It isn’t long before a shooter knows they are there, piled on top of each other like a Twister game gone horribly wrong.

Joe, Ellie, Violet, Peaches and March don’t know each other, but over the next few harrowing hours of trying to survive, losing friends and loved ones and stepping over victims, these five become intrinsically bonded.

Written as police testimony snippets, five teenage concert-goers share the horror of what unfolds around them. There is not only one man with a gun firing on the crowd, but three. They are not firing from high in a local building or even from the branches of a tree – they are inside the crowd, shooting out.

Five teenagers who didn’t know each other before this night, now rely on one another to flee, survive, and not fall completely apart.

Each of the testimony snippets can be a sentence long or two pages, but all click effortlessly into one another to race the story along. The reader gets to know each of the characters, share their fears, losses and in the aftermath, their grief and guilt at being alive when so many aren’t.

No-one knows how they would react in a terrorist situation, and the reactions of these teens are all different. I enjoyed the way they learnt the truth about one another, pushing aside the false impressions they had of each other before at school.

All have ‘stuff’ no one else ever saw, and along with individual courage, this also helps them through. The shooters themselves aren’t named, their reasons aren’t discussed, they are faceless in the narrative.

Harrowing. Heartbreaking. Revealing.

Author – Sera Milano

Age – 16+

(2021, Harper Collins, Shooting, Terrorists, Death, Concert, Courage, Bravery, Escape, Flee, Hide, Bombs, Grief, Fear, Loss, Friendship)