The Shape of Thunder

Both girls’ residual trauma from the shooting is illustrated in their reactions to the lockdown drill. Cora believes that her sister’s death taught her that “any space can be safe until it isn’t anymore” (110). Cora’s terror is illustrated in her freezing in her seat, unable to move. When Owen reassures Cora that it’s just a drill, Cora retorts that “it’s not always a drill. Sometimes it’s real” (126). Her trauma at her sister’s tragic and traumatic death causes her to feel unsafe and fearful.

Similarly, Quinn feels panicked and overwhelmed at the drill: “I try to curb the panic building inside of me by reminding myself it’s only a drill, but it doesn’t work” (121). Jasmine Warga refers to the trauma experienced by students and teachers who must endure simulations to prepare for the possibility of attack in American schools. Mrs. Euclid must “find the heaviest objects and use it to block the entrance to the library” while the students hide silently as far away from the windows and doors as they can (123).

Quinn’s ongoing attempts to mitigate her grief, through obsessing over changing the events of the school shooting, continue to be explored in these chapters. This illustrates the novel’s recurring theme of Grief and Guilt After the Loss of A Sibling. It is significant that Quinn pictures the wormhole during the lockdown drill. In a moment of extreme trauma and distress, Quinn’s imagination indicates the role that this fantasy plays in helping her to cope with her grief around the traumatic murders and suicide committed by her brother. This fantasy also allows Quinn to manage the distress of her parents’ grief. Quinn sees her mother crying and quietly vows that, through discovering a wormhole, “[She’s] going to make things better” (103). This illustrates that Quinn’s obsession with traveling back to the morning of the shooting is also an attempt to manage and control her parents’ grief, as well as her own grief and guilt.

Cora’s ongoing grief is also clear in these chapters: “My sister is dead. I miss her so much” (137). Cora is characterized as scientifically minded and intelligent. Her attempt to overcome her grief with science is clear in her experimental question: “Can I time travel to save Mabel?” (137). Cora attempts to use her intelligence, and the organization provided by a scientific experiment, to find a way around her immense grief. Warga emphasizes that the grief caused by immense loss can feel overwhelming and inconceivable in its scale. Like Quinn, Cora’s obsession with the concept of time travel demonstrates her desire to manage and control her grief.

Healing Through Human Connection and Hope is introduced as an important theme as Quinn and Cora feel a sense of hope that things might be rectified through their research into time travel. The experiment is successful in bringing them companionship in a time of suffering, and their renewed connection and friendship is the force that contributes positively to their wellbeing, rather than managing to travel through time.

Warga shows that friendship and loving support is an essential component in recovering from grief. Quinn has felt completely isolated in her grief over Parker, given his role in the shooting. A peer—who will no longer be friends with Quinn due to Parker’s crimes—makes the taunting remark during the lockdown drill, “This is just a drill. Your brother is gone, so…” (121). This illustrates that Quinn has become a pariah at school. She has even quit her beloved soccer team; she feels isolated and excluded from normal life, and doesn’t feel that she deserves the things she loves, like soccer. Cora originally tells Quinn, “I’m only doing this for Mabel,” but then restructures her research question to examine “whether or not [they] can travel back in time to prevent Parker from hurting everyone, including himself” (144). Quinn is shocked and touched that Cora changes her focus to include saving Parker’s life; at this point she feels that “it’s possible for things to be okay again” (144). This interaction emphasizes the way that human connection can allow individuals hope and solace from immense grief.

Violence Motivated by Racism is introduced as an important theme that drives the novel’s plot. Parker’s actions are revealed to have been caused by radicalization on the internet. He grew increasingly racist and sexist in the months before the shooting. Quinn remembers the first time Parker called Cora’s dad, a long-established family friend, a “nasty foreigner” (98). Warga connects smaller incidents of racism, such as this highly offensive comment, to larger-scale, tragic incidents of violent racism. Hateful comments, like Parker’s comment about Cora’s father, are represented as a gateway to more extreme and violent expressions of this hatred, as Parker was eventually drawn to commit. Warga suggests that the consequences of any expression of racism can be catastrophic, given the propensity for hatred to escalate.

Given this propensity, Warga condemns smaller and seemingly benign acts of racism, as she connects these acts to larger-scale hate crimes. Owen, who is Japanese American, experiences racism from his ignorant classmates. Cora recalls, “I’ve seen people confuse Owen as Chinese and have witnessed classmates asking him if he’s related to Ben Park, who is in our grade and is Korean” (93). Similarly, Cora’s teacher makes a generalization about Cora’s knowledge of the Middle East based on her father’s Lebanese nationality, even though this region is made up of many geographically and ethnically distinct countries. Cora struggles to come to terms with her half-Lebanese ethnicity, and society’s ignorance about it, as she thinks, “I can’t decide if it’s worse when people totally forget about that part of my identity or when people make assumptions about it” (93-94).