Going Bovine: A Good Kind of Weird

• Share This Post
• Pin It
• 9
• Sparkle (
  0
  )
   

When the 2010 Printz Award was announced in January, I was surprised that Libba Bray's Going Bovine had won. The Printz Award, for excellence in young adult literature, rarely goes to a book that you'd expect -- but, for me at least, Going Bovine was a particularly unusual choice. The reviews I'd read fell into two camps -- people who really, really loved it, and people who really, really did not.

Going Bovine is about 16-year-old Cameron. In the world of high school, Cameron is filed into the loser category, unlike his uber-popular cheerleading sister. He plans to coast through school, and life, with minimal effort. He prefers not to care; he prefers to be numb. But something, aside from general apathy, isn't quite right with Cameron. He starts seeing things, like flames coming out of walls. He tries to convince himself that he's just tired, but then he has a complete freakout in front of his family. The next thing he knows, he's surrounded by doctors who are telling him that he has Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, aka mad cow disease. There's no cure for his condition, and the disease will eat away his brain. After years of not really caring about his life, he finds that he actually really wants to live. What follows is a mind-bending ride that involves a road trip, a gnome, a punk rock angel, freeing snow globes, a happiness cult called CESSNAB and the quest for a mysterious man named Dr. X.

Audrey hadn't read Going Bovine because she thought it might be "too weird." In fact, "weird" is the word I see used most often to describe this book. YA New York not only calls it weird, but also gives it some high praise.

Suffice it to say, I have now read Going Bovine twice, and I still think it's the funniest, smartest, most interesting thing I've seen this year. Not to mention the weirdest. If Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams had all collaborated, they still wouldn’t have been able to top Libba’s masterpiece.

I didn't initially read Going Bovine because I found that people who loved Libba Bray's Gemma Doyle series were not fans of it, and people who were fans of it weren't necessarily fans of Libba Bray. I couldn't figure out why people liked it, because it didn't seem to fit any of the normal "I liked that, therefore I like this" equations. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised as it was clear from the beginning that this was going to be a different kind of book. All the evidence you need for that you can find in this promotional video by Libba Bray.

Yes, a very, very different book. It wasn't even just that it was different from Bray's other work, but it was different from pretty much everything I'd read in a long time. When I was reading Going Bovine, I commented that reading it was "rather trippy." Teresa, a librarian a H-B Woodlawn, described it as "A Wrinkle in Time" meets a marijuana-infused “Wizard of Oz.” I like her description better.

Going Bovine is not a book we would have seen even 10 years ago. As Temporary Worlds notes, Going Bovine is very much a "current" book.

The book feels incredibly current, as it touches on 21st century elements such as schools that teach you how to prepare for tests instead of think, free range fast food, and the desire to be famous in a reality TV obsessed world.

Ten years ago, would we have understood the fame-obsession or the extreme quest for happiness? Probably not, at least not to the extent we do now. It makes me wonder how well it will age. Will we look back on it as representative of this point in time? Or will we just think it aged?

Something I appreciated about Going Bovine is that while I had my suspicions about the ending, I had no clue how the author was going to get us there. I had no idea what was going to happen from one page or chapter to the next. While not knowing what was going to happen sometimes made the book feel a bit long, I really appreciated the unpredictability of it. I hate it when I read a new book and can tell you every plot and character twist before I get more than a few chapters into it.