Of Course It's a Mess

Spontaneous by Aaron Starmer
New York, NY : Dutton Books, [2016]
355 p. ; 22 cm.

A bloody mess actually, because what else would you expect when living people suddenly (or should I say spontaneously) explode into a mess of liquefied body parts and fluids?   

The beginning of Spontaneous reminds me a bit of Gone by Michael Grant, in that an ordinary day at a high school becomes anything but normal with a shocking turn of events.  In this case it's when one the seniors in the school spontaneously combusts during a class.  When this is followed by many more single and multiple combustions over the course of the novel things get very crazy, and very disturbing.

I liked the first three-fourths of this novel pretty well.  The premise is a real hook for readers and by telling it all from the viewpoint of one of the smart and grim-humored characters - Mara Carlyle - the novel moves along at a raucous, albeit grotesque pace.  Of course, the government gets involved, theories of causes emerge, the town in New Jersey where it happens is first the scene of a media frenzy, and then quarantined - all the while the hapless senior class that is being afflicted by this tragedy is trying to figure out how to keep living and keep finding meaning in life.  Part of that search revolves around friendships, family, and the sweet romance between the main character and the quirky but nice young man, Dylan.

The challenge of this novel is where to go with it.  And in that I found it not as good as I hoped.  There is a bizarre character, FBI agent Carla Rosetti who by the end of the novel has gone strangely rogue.  There is a friend who's fate is a mystery - was her end a dream or did she escape or something else? There are many unanswered questions.  I didn't expect the novel to tie up all its loose ends, or have a happy ending, but it felt to me like the storyline simply got the best of the author who couldn't figure out a satisfactory ending and so let it just kind of fizzle out.

All in all, I'd recommend it to a student who wants a bizarre story and who won't mind finishing a book while still having a lot of unanswered questions.  Besides, the writing is fresh and interesting and the novel conjures up a lot of questions about mortality, meaning and how one should live in the face of imminent dangers - a parable for our own dangerous times, perhaps.

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.