Not Mad About Mad Cow Adventures

Going Bovine
by Libba Bray
New York: Delacorte Press, 2009.
480 p. ; 22 cm.

All right, this book garnered great praise and won the 2010 Printz Award - but... I just couldn't lose myself in this overwrought book. The back of the book offers breathless comparisons to Catcher in the Rye and predicts that it may well become a cult classic. I don't think so. It's hard to put my finger on what I don't like about this book, but perhaps a few excerpts will illustrate:

"'Who the heck is Don Quicks-oat?' That's what Chet King wants to know.

It's early February, six weeks into the new semester, and we're in English class, which for most of us is an excruciating exercise in staying awake through the great classics of literature. These works - groundbreaking, incendiary, timeless - have been pureed by the curriculum monsters into a digestible pabulum of themes and factoids we can spew back on a test. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave...." (p.6)

***

"After some minor league pleading with Mom, she agrees to let me take the Turdmobile, her crap-brown box of a car. It's ugly but it runs, and it's better than the bus when you're late. All down the block, the lawns are alive with men on riding mowers. They gallop across their yards, whipping them into shape, in control of those few square feet of ground. All hail the suburban action heroes!" (p.39)

I just don't buy it. The voice is of an adult writing as if a teen. I think what made Catcher in the Rye so unbelievably great, was its pure originality. There's nothing about this character that's original. He's cynical about school, jocks, and suburbia...yeah? A real cult classic will have a protagonist who loves suburbia and who's school is both inspirational and dull and complicated - now that I will get my attention.

The plot of the story is creative and original, though, featuring the hero who is literally losing his mind to mad cow disease. Is the narrative real or in his head? For this the book deserves great praise, in that it's action puts you very much inside the mind of someone who's mind is disintegrating and becoming increasingly unreliable.

My experience with this book is that it just doesn't circulate all that much, and the several kids who checked it out did not recommend it, alas.