Reviewer: Rowena Butter by Erin Jade Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication Date: September 4th 2012
Genres: Young Adult
Pages: 294
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A lonely obese boy everyone calls "Butter" is about to make history. He is going to eat himself to death-live on the Internet-and everyone is invited to watch. When he first makes the announcement online to his classmates, Butter expects pity, insults, and possibly sheer indifference. What he gets are morbid cheerleaders rallying around his deadly plan. Yet as their dark encouragement grows, it begins to feel a lot like popularity. And that feels good. But what happens when Butter reaches his suicide deadline? Can he live with the fallout if he doesn't go through with his plans?
With a deft hand, E.J. Lange allows readers to identify with both the bullies and the bullied in this all-consuming look at one teen's battle with himself.
What a disturbing premise for a book but as disturbing as it was, I was curious to see how this story would be told so I had to read it. So this book follows a young man in high school, who is obese (423 pounds) and nicknamed Butter by these douche-bags from his school. He’s a big guy and he’s been to fat camp but he eats his feelings and he goes through a lot of things in this book. I thought that the author did a wonderful job of bringing this story to life.
She really dug into Butter’s character and made him a three-dimensional character and I enjoyed reading his story. Well, I shouldn’t say that I enjoyed reading his story because there was a lot about this book that I didn’t like. It was very hard to read at times because of everything that Butter went through. The people that he dealt with at school, the new friends that he made after making the website, the suicide planning itself, all of that was really hard to read and my heart hurt for Butter because that was his life.
It was very hard to like the people that came into Butter’s life because of the website. You see, Butter launches a website with the plan to eat himself to death on New Year’s Eve and catch it all on a live stream. He’s hurting and he’s not happy with himself and his life and he goes through things that was very hard to get through.
There were times when I wanted to strangle Butter because of the lashing out he did with his parents and with his teachers and even the kids around school but more than anything, I worried about him while I was reading the book. He’s dealing with a lot of things and he feels alone and like nobody understands because the one person that he was closest to at fat camp is now on his way to getting skinny and Butter feels like he missed his opportunity with that one but what I really liked about this book was how the author told the story. It was told in a straight forward way with enough emotion thrown in to make the story stay with you.
This was an interesting story that made me sit up and think about the way that I treat others online and how important it is to talk to my daughter about the online treatment of others and really just to talk to her about bullying of any kind. This book brought things up in my own life that I need to fix and it hit all of my emotional buttons so I’m glad that I read this book.
…and that’s your scoop!
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