![Picture](/uploads/3/0/6/8/30687363/4432851.jpg?174.23376623376623)
Book Summary:
Cameron is your average sixteen-year-old. He works at Buddha Burger, dreams of unattainable girls, gets annoyed at his perfect sister Jenna and her obnoxious boyfriend, occasionally tokes it up in the high school bathroom, and generally, tries to go through life without making too many waves. He is annoyed by his air-headed mother and suspicious of his philandering father. When Cameron spazzes out in class, teachers and parents assume it is because of drugs. In the ensuing investigation, doctors discover instead that Cameron has Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, also known as “mad cow disease.” After being hospitalized Cameron’s condition deteriorates and the plot begins to take a surreal turn. From this point onwards, readers are forced to question what is real—and whether it matters what is real.
A sugar-addicted, punk-rocker angel named Dulcie appears to Cameron and tells him he has a mission to save the world from a mysterious nemesis called the Wizard of Reckoning. Cameron can save his life and the planet by hunting down Dr. X. and closing a wormhole that threatens to devour everyone and everything. She gives him a Disney World wristband, a relic from a childhood trip where he nearly died on the It’s’ a Small World Ride. In a moment straight out of Back to the Future, she informs him that when the band fades away, his time is up. Cameron persuades his hospital roommate and classmate, Gonzo to accompany him on his quest to find Dr. X. Gonzo is a dwarf with an overprotective mother and a preternatural obsession with death and video games.
Guided by random signs in newspapers and signs, Cameron and Gonzo head off on a fantastic adventure that parallels the story of Don Quixote and Sancho, which was incidentally the book Cameron, was reading in his English/Spanish class when he was diagnosed. The dynamic duo head to the Horn and Ivory club in New Orleans to hear a famous jazz trumpeter, Junior Webster play his horn. Mid-performance, Junior is struck down by the Wizard of Reckoning and Cameron and Gonzo flee as the fire giants wreck the club. Armed only with Junior’s sunglasses and a cryptic message to bury them under an angel, Cameron and Gonzo head to a cemetery where they receive their next clue.
They hop a bus to Daytona, Florida, home of the reality TV show YA! Party House. After they miss the bus and are stranded in the middle of nowhere, a van picks them up and takes them to CESSNAB, a cult where everyone is “special” and “happy” all the time. After inadvertently triggering a revolution at the compound by shattering the ideal of perfect happiness, Gonzo and Cameron wind up at Mister Motel for the night. Ready to cut lose, Cameron crashes a party with two random people he meets at the Gas-It-n-Git station. At the party, he befriends a yard gnome who can talk. Balder, who is an immortal Viking god, swears allegiance to his rescuer and then steals cash from a drug dealer named Carbine. The cash is necessary because the police are actively hunting them down.
After being attacked by fire giants at a local diner called the Konstant Kettle, Gonzo and Cameron decide to use the cash Balder stole to buy a car, a Caddy Rocinante from a used car dealer named Arthur Limbaud. Cameron and Gonzo are now accused of being terrorists, and Cameron sees on the news that a company named United Snow Globe Wholesalers is offering a $10,000 bounty on their heads. After some car trouble, they wind up at a secret underground lab called Putopia, where they find out more information about Dr. X and Cameron actually travels to another dimension to try and find him, but they have little success. Headed back on the road, Cameron decides to pick up three hitchhikers as cover from the police. The three goofy frat boys, Marty, Dave, and Keith, repay Cameron’s kindness by stealing Balder to auction him off in a pathetic attempt to be on TV at the YA! Party House. After realizing that their wee but stalwart companion is missing, Cameron and Gonzo go back to find him.
At the YA! Party House, a series of crazy hijinx ensue as they try to steal Balder back, first in a bidding war and then by Gonzo agreeing to face his worst fears on a show called I Double Dog Dare You. The pair is separated for a time, during which Cameron has a disappointing first sexual encounter with Staci Johnson, one of his sister’s friends. He later makes up for it by sleeping with his angel, Dulcie, which is a far better experience. When he is reunited with Gonzo, who has Balder in tow, his friend has been transformed; he has a blue and black Mohawk, a new tattoo, and new boyfriend, Drew, who actually gave him medical care at the Party House.
At this point, they all break for the beach before heading to Disney. Cameron wants to keep his promise to Balder to go to the sea and look for his ship, Ringhorn, which Balder believes will arrive and take him to Valhalla so he can leave this mortal world. At the beach, the trio is jumped by a bunch of United Globes Wholesalers goons, Balder is killed, and Dulcie is imprisoned in a snow globe. Desperate to save her, Cameron and Gonzo follow the United Snowglobes truck to Disneyland to save her. There, they are ultimately separated. In a door in the Small World ride, Cameron discovers Dr. X. in his secret lab and confronts him, only to find out that Dr. X is responsible for the technology that has frozen Dulcie behind glass. This is the cure Dr. X offers him, but Cameron refuses to accept this fate. During this scene, the reader hears snippets of a conversation as Cameron’s life support is turned off. The book ends with the sky igniting and Dulcie embracing Cameron.
APA Reference:
Bray, L. (2009). Going bovine. New York, NY: Ember.
Impressions:
This book is brainy, surreal, hilarious, and emotionally searing, but I’m not sure it is for everyone. I enjoyed reading this book for the same reasons I enjoyed reading David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest. The intertextuality, the layering of different allusions, archetypes, and symbols was appealing to me; reading it was sort of like putting together a large jigsaw puzzle.
I think the humor, frank language, and emotional realism will be appealing to teens, but some less mature readers may be thrown by the shifting, trippy, and often convoluted plot. This is especially true as Bray weaves in small doses of reality in the fantastic world where Cameron’s epic odyssey transpires. For example, while Cameron encounters fire giants in the middle of a back-country road, the reader hears Dr. Xavier being paged and Cameron feels someone pushing on his chest, implying that his nurse of the hospital is doing CPR, implying that the fire giants are not real (p.196).
The end of the book also suggests that what occurred was a hallucination due to Cameron’s brain deterioration, an ending reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz. Did it really happen? What is real, and does it matter? This book is long, but well worth the effort, but it is not a read that you can put down and pick back up a few days later. I tried to do this and found myself having to re-read substantial portions just to figure out what had happened. Some teens will have the patience for this, but others won’t. This is a book that demands that you think while you read it, and that won’t be appealing to everyone, which is a shame, because the book tackles some poignant questions about identity, our place in the world, and whether human suffering means anything. These are big, meaty questions, and, for the most part, Libba Bray handles them well. I found myself underlining so many one-liners as I read. The aphorisms were meaningful, but there were so many of them that I felt like Libba Bray was beating me over the head with them at the same time. I felt the same way about her use of figurative language and sound devices.
There is some gorgeous prose here. For example, the appearance of the fire giants is dramatically underscored by the pacing and sounds of the language. The following passage does a good job of Bray’s vivid imagery and use of alliteration, assonance, and sentence variety to heighten the reader’s suspense and affect a dramatic mood: “I start to call out, but my feet are summer-sidewalk hot. I hop back just as small puncture holes pop up along the ground. There’s a hiss from below, and before I can shout a warning, the asphalt splits open with the force of a geyser. Steam, smoke, and flames shoot into the sky…” (p.195). Some of Bray’s images are often as humorous as they are descriptive. For example, after Gonzo lets the bus ride away without them, he hangs his head “like a little kid who just peed on the carpet by mistake” (p.190). Bray often makes deft use of language, but sometimes her comparisons are so wacky or over the top that they seem absurd or ridiculous. A comparison does not always need to be made for every description, and sometimes Bray’s overuse made her writing seem self-conscious. Yes, they are creative, but when there are too many of them, the reader is forced to consider whether all of them are necessary. Some odd figures of speech leave the reader scratching her head, including a passage comparing bus passengers’ jaws to “the arms of a can opener left on a counter” and another that tugboats “shining on the river like floating bones”(p.182, 164). All in all, I feel the book would have been improved by a smidge more editing.
Still, the ubiquitous connections to different disciplines, including physics, music, world literature, and philosophy leave it with vast potential in a school setting. It would be easy and fun to create cross-curricular lessons, units, activities, or programming related to the book.
Professional Review:
Gr 8 Up--In this ambitious novel, Cameron, a 16-year-old slacker whose somewhat dysfunctional family has just about given up on him, as perhaps he himself has, when his diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jacob, "mad cow" disease, reunites them, if too late. The heart of the story, though, is a hallucinatory--or is it?--quest with many parallels to the hopeless but inspirational efforts of Don Quixote, about whom Cameron had been reading before his illness. Just like the crazy--or was he?--Spaniard, Cam is motivated to go on a journey by a sort of Dulcinea. His pink-haired, white-winged version goes by Dulcie and leads him to take up arms against the Dark Wizard and fire giants that attack him intermittently, and to find a missing Dr. X, who can both help save the world and cure him. Cameron's Sancho is a Mexican-American dwarf, game-master hypochondriac he met in the pot smokers' bathroom at school who later turns up as his hospital roommate. Bray blends in a hearty dose of satire on the road trip as Cameron leaves his Texas deathbed--or does he?--to battle evil forces with a legendary jazz horn player, to escape the evil clutches of a happiness cult, to experiment with cloistered scientists trying to solve the mysteries of the universe, and to save a yard gnome embodying a Viking god from the clutches of the materialistic, fame-obsessed MTV-culture clones who shun individual thought. It's a trip worth taking, though meandering and message-driven at times. Some teens may check out before Cameron makes it to his final destination, but many will enjoy asking themselves the questions both deep and shallow that pop up along the way.~~~By Suzanne Gordon, Peachtree Ridge High School, Suwanee, GA
Gordon, S. (2009). [Review of the book Going bovine, by L. Bray]. School Library Journal, 55(9), 151. Retrieved from EBSCOHost Database.https://libproxy.library.unt.edu:9443/loginurl=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=44220938&scope=site
Library Uses:
Because the book has so many references to physics, it might be fun to do some library programming to show off physics in the library. For example, you could have an interactive exhibit with the book to introduce students to some of the key physics theories and concepts in the book. QR codes could be printed out so students could scan the display with their phones and instantly access videos about concepts like string theory, or Schrodinger’s cat. In fact, you could even set up an interactive poll about Schrodinger’s cat, whether it is dead or alive, and connect that to the book. The QR code display would mimic the many messy yet connected memes in the book. A QR code could also be included to a video book talk or book trailer for the book and another code to link students directly to the OPAC for the book, both at the school library and the public library. Since Bray’s book has some controversial content, another approach to this display might be to include multiple fiction books with connections to science (such as A Wrinkle in Time, for example) in the same display, each with a QR code /video link to a different scientific concept.
Cameron is your average sixteen-year-old. He works at Buddha Burger, dreams of unattainable girls, gets annoyed at his perfect sister Jenna and her obnoxious boyfriend, occasionally tokes it up in the high school bathroom, and generally, tries to go through life without making too many waves. He is annoyed by his air-headed mother and suspicious of his philandering father. When Cameron spazzes out in class, teachers and parents assume it is because of drugs. In the ensuing investigation, doctors discover instead that Cameron has Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, also known as “mad cow disease.” After being hospitalized Cameron’s condition deteriorates and the plot begins to take a surreal turn. From this point onwards, readers are forced to question what is real—and whether it matters what is real.
A sugar-addicted, punk-rocker angel named Dulcie appears to Cameron and tells him he has a mission to save the world from a mysterious nemesis called the Wizard of Reckoning. Cameron can save his life and the planet by hunting down Dr. X. and closing a wormhole that threatens to devour everyone and everything. She gives him a Disney World wristband, a relic from a childhood trip where he nearly died on the It’s’ a Small World Ride. In a moment straight out of Back to the Future, she informs him that when the band fades away, his time is up. Cameron persuades his hospital roommate and classmate, Gonzo to accompany him on his quest to find Dr. X. Gonzo is a dwarf with an overprotective mother and a preternatural obsession with death and video games.
Guided by random signs in newspapers and signs, Cameron and Gonzo head off on a fantastic adventure that parallels the story of Don Quixote and Sancho, which was incidentally the book Cameron, was reading in his English/Spanish class when he was diagnosed. The dynamic duo head to the Horn and Ivory club in New Orleans to hear a famous jazz trumpeter, Junior Webster play his horn. Mid-performance, Junior is struck down by the Wizard of Reckoning and Cameron and Gonzo flee as the fire giants wreck the club. Armed only with Junior’s sunglasses and a cryptic message to bury them under an angel, Cameron and Gonzo head to a cemetery where they receive their next clue.
They hop a bus to Daytona, Florida, home of the reality TV show YA! Party House. After they miss the bus and are stranded in the middle of nowhere, a van picks them up and takes them to CESSNAB, a cult where everyone is “special” and “happy” all the time. After inadvertently triggering a revolution at the compound by shattering the ideal of perfect happiness, Gonzo and Cameron wind up at Mister Motel for the night. Ready to cut lose, Cameron crashes a party with two random people he meets at the Gas-It-n-Git station. At the party, he befriends a yard gnome who can talk. Balder, who is an immortal Viking god, swears allegiance to his rescuer and then steals cash from a drug dealer named Carbine. The cash is necessary because the police are actively hunting them down.
After being attacked by fire giants at a local diner called the Konstant Kettle, Gonzo and Cameron decide to use the cash Balder stole to buy a car, a Caddy Rocinante from a used car dealer named Arthur Limbaud. Cameron and Gonzo are now accused of being terrorists, and Cameron sees on the news that a company named United Snow Globe Wholesalers is offering a $10,000 bounty on their heads. After some car trouble, they wind up at a secret underground lab called Putopia, where they find out more information about Dr. X and Cameron actually travels to another dimension to try and find him, but they have little success. Headed back on the road, Cameron decides to pick up three hitchhikers as cover from the police. The three goofy frat boys, Marty, Dave, and Keith, repay Cameron’s kindness by stealing Balder to auction him off in a pathetic attempt to be on TV at the YA! Party House. After realizing that their wee but stalwart companion is missing, Cameron and Gonzo go back to find him.
At the YA! Party House, a series of crazy hijinx ensue as they try to steal Balder back, first in a bidding war and then by Gonzo agreeing to face his worst fears on a show called I Double Dog Dare You. The pair is separated for a time, during which Cameron has a disappointing first sexual encounter with Staci Johnson, one of his sister’s friends. He later makes up for it by sleeping with his angel, Dulcie, which is a far better experience. When he is reunited with Gonzo, who has Balder in tow, his friend has been transformed; he has a blue and black Mohawk, a new tattoo, and new boyfriend, Drew, who actually gave him medical care at the Party House.
At this point, they all break for the beach before heading to Disney. Cameron wants to keep his promise to Balder to go to the sea and look for his ship, Ringhorn, which Balder believes will arrive and take him to Valhalla so he can leave this mortal world. At the beach, the trio is jumped by a bunch of United Globes Wholesalers goons, Balder is killed, and Dulcie is imprisoned in a snow globe. Desperate to save her, Cameron and Gonzo follow the United Snowglobes truck to Disneyland to save her. There, they are ultimately separated. In a door in the Small World ride, Cameron discovers Dr. X. in his secret lab and confronts him, only to find out that Dr. X is responsible for the technology that has frozen Dulcie behind glass. This is the cure Dr. X offers him, but Cameron refuses to accept this fate. During this scene, the reader hears snippets of a conversation as Cameron’s life support is turned off. The book ends with the sky igniting and Dulcie embracing Cameron.
APA Reference:
Bray, L. (2009). Going bovine. New York, NY: Ember.
Impressions:
This book is brainy, surreal, hilarious, and emotionally searing, but I’m not sure it is for everyone. I enjoyed reading this book for the same reasons I enjoyed reading David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest. The intertextuality, the layering of different allusions, archetypes, and symbols was appealing to me; reading it was sort of like putting together a large jigsaw puzzle.
I think the humor, frank language, and emotional realism will be appealing to teens, but some less mature readers may be thrown by the shifting, trippy, and often convoluted plot. This is especially true as Bray weaves in small doses of reality in the fantastic world where Cameron’s epic odyssey transpires. For example, while Cameron encounters fire giants in the middle of a back-country road, the reader hears Dr. Xavier being paged and Cameron feels someone pushing on his chest, implying that his nurse of the hospital is doing CPR, implying that the fire giants are not real (p.196).
The end of the book also suggests that what occurred was a hallucination due to Cameron’s brain deterioration, an ending reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz. Did it really happen? What is real, and does it matter? This book is long, but well worth the effort, but it is not a read that you can put down and pick back up a few days later. I tried to do this and found myself having to re-read substantial portions just to figure out what had happened. Some teens will have the patience for this, but others won’t. This is a book that demands that you think while you read it, and that won’t be appealing to everyone, which is a shame, because the book tackles some poignant questions about identity, our place in the world, and whether human suffering means anything. These are big, meaty questions, and, for the most part, Libba Bray handles them well. I found myself underlining so many one-liners as I read. The aphorisms were meaningful, but there were so many of them that I felt like Libba Bray was beating me over the head with them at the same time. I felt the same way about her use of figurative language and sound devices.
There is some gorgeous prose here. For example, the appearance of the fire giants is dramatically underscored by the pacing and sounds of the language. The following passage does a good job of Bray’s vivid imagery and use of alliteration, assonance, and sentence variety to heighten the reader’s suspense and affect a dramatic mood: “I start to call out, but my feet are summer-sidewalk hot. I hop back just as small puncture holes pop up along the ground. There’s a hiss from below, and before I can shout a warning, the asphalt splits open with the force of a geyser. Steam, smoke, and flames shoot into the sky…” (p.195). Some of Bray’s images are often as humorous as they are descriptive. For example, after Gonzo lets the bus ride away without them, he hangs his head “like a little kid who just peed on the carpet by mistake” (p.190). Bray often makes deft use of language, but sometimes her comparisons are so wacky or over the top that they seem absurd or ridiculous. A comparison does not always need to be made for every description, and sometimes Bray’s overuse made her writing seem self-conscious. Yes, they are creative, but when there are too many of them, the reader is forced to consider whether all of them are necessary. Some odd figures of speech leave the reader scratching her head, including a passage comparing bus passengers’ jaws to “the arms of a can opener left on a counter” and another that tugboats “shining on the river like floating bones”(p.182, 164). All in all, I feel the book would have been improved by a smidge more editing.
Still, the ubiquitous connections to different disciplines, including physics, music, world literature, and philosophy leave it with vast potential in a school setting. It would be easy and fun to create cross-curricular lessons, units, activities, or programming related to the book.
Professional Review:
Gr 8 Up--In this ambitious novel, Cameron, a 16-year-old slacker whose somewhat dysfunctional family has just about given up on him, as perhaps he himself has, when his diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jacob, "mad cow" disease, reunites them, if too late. The heart of the story, though, is a hallucinatory--or is it?--quest with many parallels to the hopeless but inspirational efforts of Don Quixote, about whom Cameron had been reading before his illness. Just like the crazy--or was he?--Spaniard, Cam is motivated to go on a journey by a sort of Dulcinea. His pink-haired, white-winged version goes by Dulcie and leads him to take up arms against the Dark Wizard and fire giants that attack him intermittently, and to find a missing Dr. X, who can both help save the world and cure him. Cameron's Sancho is a Mexican-American dwarf, game-master hypochondriac he met in the pot smokers' bathroom at school who later turns up as his hospital roommate. Bray blends in a hearty dose of satire on the road trip as Cameron leaves his Texas deathbed--or does he?--to battle evil forces with a legendary jazz horn player, to escape the evil clutches of a happiness cult, to experiment with cloistered scientists trying to solve the mysteries of the universe, and to save a yard gnome embodying a Viking god from the clutches of the materialistic, fame-obsessed MTV-culture clones who shun individual thought. It's a trip worth taking, though meandering and message-driven at times. Some teens may check out before Cameron makes it to his final destination, but many will enjoy asking themselves the questions both deep and shallow that pop up along the way.~~~By Suzanne Gordon, Peachtree Ridge High School, Suwanee, GA
Gordon, S. (2009). [Review of the book Going bovine, by L. Bray]. School Library Journal, 55(9), 151. Retrieved from EBSCOHost Database.https://libproxy.library.unt.edu:9443/loginurl=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=44220938&scope=site
Library Uses:
Because the book has so many references to physics, it might be fun to do some library programming to show off physics in the library. For example, you could have an interactive exhibit with the book to introduce students to some of the key physics theories and concepts in the book. QR codes could be printed out so students could scan the display with their phones and instantly access videos about concepts like string theory, or Schrodinger’s cat. In fact, you could even set up an interactive poll about Schrodinger’s cat, whether it is dead or alive, and connect that to the book. The QR code display would mimic the many messy yet connected memes in the book. A QR code could also be included to a video book talk or book trailer for the book and another code to link students directly to the OPAC for the book, both at the school library and the public library. Since Bray’s book has some controversial content, another approach to this display might be to include multiple fiction books with connections to science (such as A Wrinkle in Time, for example) in the same display, each with a QR code /video link to a different scientific concept.