The Boreal Five – five friends how grew up on the same street, each quirky in their own teenage way but bonded through life’s events.   Suddenly they are cut to four as a classmate, also from Boreal street, guns down one of them during a presentation in English class.  Each of them has bullied the at one point or another over the years.  Though stopped and now locked up, they wonder if it could have been them.  Rem — our narrator– is even more tied into the mess as his scientist mother is now doing experiments on the gunman via probes inserted into his brain.  Rem is asked to come converse with the gunman so they can watch his brain react.  So begins Tattoo Atlas.

This story is very multi-layered.  School shootings make way for ethics in scientific research, which take a side seat at times to examples of outed and closeted gay students as well as the death of an enlisted brother, not to mention the betrayal in a mother/son relationship.   A psycho thriller at heart, Tim Floreen’s characterizations are what make this book so interesting even as it is soooo far fetched.  But where it falls miserably short is in the point of the title of the book.  Rem keeps a sketchbook that he calls his Tatoo Atlas but it never really ties dramatically into the story.  This reader kept waiting for an ingenious weaving of the plot to the atlas but it never came to a fruition that would make it worthy of the naming of the book.  And the tooth — the tooth swap at the end was too much!   Any editor should have axed that one line.

In as much as this could be a recommended read for high school students, the flaws weigh heavily on this reviewer.