Duncan returns to his senior year at the Irving boarding school haunted by the unnamed disaster that he was involved in last year. He’s also nervous about the defining (and exhausting) senior project called “The Tragedy Paper,” and excited for his private room. As it turns out, his private room was last occupied by Tim MacBeth—a former student who was troubled and isolated due to his albinism—and the cause of the disaster that crowded Duncan’s thoughts all summer.
Tim has left behind for Duncan a series of CDs, recording his tumultuous last semester at Irving—including his fraught love affair with the most beautiful girl in school and the bloody tragedy that followed. The more Duncan listens, the more obsessed he becomes with Tim’s story and the causes and implications of tragedy, until he realizes that he faces a similar choice to Tim: either let passivity draw him into a terrible mistake or take charge of the things important to him.
As a recovering English major, I thoroughly enjoyed every page of The Tragedy Paper, which tosses around literary terms like magnitude and fatal flaw and catharsis like a Jack Reacher novel tosses around bodies. The prose was simple and clean, but well-polished and evocative. And despite the slow pacing of the novel, I couldn’t help but race through the pages, knowing that Tim was nearing to the tragic climax of his story and desperate to know what it was that had shattered so many lives. Readers craving literary young adult a la John Green and Libba Bray will enjoy LaBan’s debut novel, as will readers who love boarding school stories like The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks and The Chocolate War.