I know, the title sounds like it's going to be a 500-page ex-vegan diatribe. My roommate gave me a look when he saw me reading it. But when I hastily explained the plot to him, he just asked me "where do you find these books?" A fair question.
If I have a favorite genre of fiction, it's whatever one includes road trips, weird shit, bizarre humor, and characters who are certifiably (if not certified) insane. I guess it's kind of a specific category?
Regardless, that's kind of what Going Bovine by Libba Bray falls into. The story basically revolves around a kid who's a bit of a loser and an asshole, in that loveable YA fiction way, who gets Mad Cow Disease and then starts to wildly hallucinate that he's on a mission to save the world from fire giants and find the dimension-jumping doctor/scientist who can give him the cure. There's legendary NOLA jazz trumpeters, old ladies in seaside cottages, some pseudoscience, and a Daytona Beach spring break party house. There's a "punk angel" who's frankly a lot more pop than punk. There are Norse god-gnomes. There are hypochondriac teenage dwarfs, but not the LOTR kind, the regular kind. Oh, and a lot of Disney World.
I like the bit about the tree in Hope, Georgia that grants wishes. Loveable-Asshole-Boy didn't. Tant pis.
The satire is far less than subtle and at points way overdone, but I appreciated the jabs at standardized testing (which surprisingly is not something I've seen as often as you'd think in YA fiction). The writing isn't inspired, but it feels natural to the narrator. Also don't read this if you have a strong fear of getting It's a Small World After All stuck in your head. You've been warned.
I guess if The Fault in Our Stars is the big, tragic, romantic, inspiring dying children YA book of the day, Going Bovine is the "what the hell was that actually, maybe someone dies I guess, oh and I laughed" sort of novel.
I enjoyed it. 7/10. If it sounds like your kind of thing, consider yourself recommended.
Word count: 123,224
Kristie's total points: 123,224
3 comments:
DAT COVER, this definitely looks like some vegan bullshit. Did you read this because you were like 'lol look at this CGI cow rn'?
Also the original point of this club also was to like track points of how many words you read in order to eventually assign a winner. So maybe we should include word count in the posts? It's not going to take long to get into the millions but tbh I want millions of points.
Also I'd say about 50% of my reading is actually listening to audiobooks, but since listening takes more time than actually reading, I'm still counting it. I'll add word counts to my posts and maybe we can keep a bar or something at the side with points? I don't know if I can get some sort of widget to track it, I might shift this over to WordPress eventually for more flexibility.
Hey man, that cow is not having any of your shit, just look at him.
Word count competition, nobody told me about this part??
Ok, when do we start our count from? Are we starting from when we joined this blog, or what?
It's more book competition.
It's starts now like whatever you've posted so far.
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