YA Book Club: Going Bovine

Welcome to the inaugural Consider the Daffodil YA Book Club, featuring the funny and thought-provoking Going Bovine by Libba Bray. I know that some of the people who are reading this are a bit behind, but I wanted to post this anyway for those of you I don't know in real life who may have already finished the book.

Anyway...

Going Bovine is definitely not everyone's cup of tea. It's a weird fantasy adventure, a mash-up of Percy Jackson and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, that talks about physics, obscure diseases, Don Quixote, drag queens, jazz music, religious cults, reality TV, and Norse mythology. It's got a male protagonist who is such an apathetic loser, he can be hard to relate to. And most importantly, it looks death right in the face. This book shouldn't work.

And yet it does (at least for some people, and I count myself among them). Going Bovine allows teens (and everyone else, of course) to get right up into the heart of impending doom (be it our main character Cameron's life or the End of the Universe as we know it) from the safety of a bunch of words on pages.

To be frank, while I was reading the book, I loved little bits but felt overall that it dragged. There were just a few too many set pieces (CESSNAB, PUTOpia, the YA beach house among them). They all felt a little bit like the Las Vegas hotel of the Lotus Eaters in the first Percy Jackson book - yes, I see what you're doing there, but let's move things alone now, please, there's story I want to get to. That having been said, the key elements of the story - much of the discussion below - has really stuck with me, and I think Bray does a good job at confronting mortality within the context of humor and adventure. (She also manages to give an interview in a cow suit quite well.)

I'm not going to summarize the book, although you should feel free to summarize any bits you see fit. I'll post the questions first, then chime in later with my own comments. I really want to hear what you have to say! Feel free to add any of your own questions as well. Spoilers from here on out.

1)For such a funny book, Going Bovine hits on some really big questions (Questions, even). Do you think this balance worked?

2) Why is Cameron's childhood trip to Disney World and his subsequent near-drowning the happiest day of his life?

3)What's up with the snow globes and the United Snow Globe Wholesalers?

4)Did Cameron actually go on this wild adventure? Or was he in his hospital bed the whole time?

5)The "one true thing" Cam learned on his travels, as he tells Dr. X, is that "to live is to love, to love is to live." What do you make of that? How did he come to realize the truth in this Great Tremelo song that he had previously listened to only ironically?

6)The obligatory casting question: Who would you cast in Going Bovine: The Movie? (Cameron and Dulcie probably being the easiest to cast).

Inaugural YA Book Club

Welcome to the Consider the Daffodil Young Adult book club! Back in January, my friend Erin and I started a small book club for Boston-area people interested in YA books. When Erin moved across the country a few months ago, I didn't want to wrangle monthly meetings, especially when she and I made up the majority of the group. So here we are - an online book club. The best part is that we're not bound by location anymore, so I'm looking forward to a wider group of people joining in. Please feel free to spread this around to others who are interested in YA literature, and if you have any suggestions, please email them to me.

For our first (online) book, we'll be reading Going Bovine by Libba Bray. The book follows Cameron, something of a high school loser, who develops Mad Cow Disease. In order to find a cure, he goes on a madcap cross-country journey with fellow loser Gonzo. I've already started reading the book, and I've been laughing hard at Cameron's exploits. I'd describe it as Percy Jackson with a touch of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Discussion will begin right here on August 1st.

Ship Breaker

I've been hearing such amazing things about author Paolo Bacigalupi for a while now, and I walk by his novel The Windup Girl every day. When his YA novel Ship Breaker came up on the list for our YA book group, I was happy to have a reason to finally read him.

And can I say how happy I am that I did? Less than half-way through Ship Breaker, I had to buy a copy of Windup Girl because I loved his writing so much. His descriptions of a world in which the environment is battling back against us and people work in harsh conditions make everything seem disturbingly real.

Nailer, our protagonist, lives and works on a beach on the Louisiana coast, scuttling through ducts on a grounded oil tanker, dragging costly metals like copper back to the surface to sell. When a city killer storm (the kind of storm that has made this world rebuild New Orleans three times) rolls through and the beach community gets destroyed, Nailer and his friend Pima venture down the beach to see what washed up during the storm. What they find, though, is one of the nicest ships they've ever seen, a true bounty of scavengable material. Of course, they find something more precious than even they expected, and then Nailer is forced to leave the only home he's ever known to protect it.

There are many things going for this novel. First, the main character is a boy, so rare in well-written YA. Second, there are no creatures to deal with (genetically-designed half men aside), and the frighteningly real environment and plain human nature are the things that cause trouble. Third, this is a world that it is easy to imagine could come about, and thinking through how we could get from here to there is a great exercise for kids. There needs to be more of this in YA - good, straightforward sci-fi storytelling.

5/5 stars

Red Eye, Black Eye

Red Eye, Black Eye is an autobiographical graphic novel, chronicling K. Thor Jensen's 60-day, 10,000-mile Greyhound bus trip across America. There's no real story, just stops along the way, where he met people he only knew from the internet and basically just trusted himself to the road for two months. This is the underbelly of America - no shiny tourist spots (well, he does visit Disneyland... but then vows never to have fun again). It's a very quick read, and certainly not earth-shattering, but quite enjoyable.

Snuff

Oh, Chuck, what have you done. Here I am, defending your last two books (which still remain my favorites), and you disappoint me. Snuff seems like only a sketch of what your other books are.

Snuff tells the story of porn star Cassie Wright, who wants to break records by being filmed with 600 men in one day. It will be her crowning achievement, and perhaps the definitive film in the genre. The story is told by three of the gentlemen (Mr. 72, Mr. 137, and Mr. 600), as well as Wright's (female) assistant. Unfortunately, unlike most of of Palahniuk's characters before this, the characters seemed one-dimensional in their quirkiness.

Then We Came to the End

I went to my first meeting of the Brookline Booksmith Book Club yesterday to discuss Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris. The group was quite mixed on the book, but the overall rating was 3.6 out of 5.

Then We Came To The End follows a group of coworkers in a Chicago ad agency during the summer of 2001. Lay-offs are rampant, and the staff is abuzz with rumors about who will be next. The group is filled with characters - at least, until you realize that they're not really characters so much as people you know. There's the guy who likes to read inspirational quotes to people, the girl who has to try every new restaurant in the city (yeah, I've been her at times), the couple who are not-so-secretly having an affair, and the one guy who refuses to play along with the whole "game" of office politics.

Every time someone is fired in the book, the term "walking Spanish" is used, referencing how pirates used to lift Spanish sailors up by the scruff of their necks and make them walk on their tip-toes before throwing them off the decks of their ships. I really like the term, and it has found its way into my own vocabulary now. I always have to laud an author who can manage to do that.

My favorite part of the book was something that seemed gimmicky to some of the book club members: it is told in the first person plural - "we". In a book that is ostensibly about the shallow relationships formed at work and the way coworkers get wrapped up in gossip, using "we" allowed the reader to more intimately become a part of the goings-on. The section in the middle, however, detailing one evening in the life of the boss, was told in third person singular, making the jump in point of view jarring. I would have preferred the story to stay with the first voice the entire time, making the reader's (shallow) connection to the characters that much stronger.