This: an attempt to archive. An attempt at futility. An attempt to gather and collect and piece together and put away, an assemblage of articles and documents and reports and profiles. A archive of record, that this happened.
-- Narrator (chapter 1)

Importance: While describing what the yearbook is in an abstract way, Valente also describes what her novel is attempting to capture. Not only is a yearbook of way of memorializing events occurring in over a specific period of time in a specific place, but a novel accomplishes that as well, albeit for a fiction place. What the yearbook hopes to accomplish, preserving the emotional climate and gravitas of the tragedies, is the same as what Valente is trying to create with the book itself.

He’d spent the previous night researching, the only means of coping he knew: how to forget. What the brain retains. How it reiterates and maintains the detail of...
-- Nick (chapter 4)