Going Bovine

I moped when Marcelo in the Real World did not win the Printz Award this year. (Marcelo is a gorgeous book and I highly recommend it to anyone over the age of 14 -- adults included!) But I knew that I could not nurse that sense of injury for long without reading the actual Printz winner, Going Bovine. If I was going to be self-righteous, I might as well do it without being a hypocrite. A marginal distinction, I grant you, but still one I was willing to make.

Y'all, Going Bovine is weird... but it might deserve the Printz Award. In this strange story, Cameron Smith contracts mad cow disease and ends up on a road trip quest to save the world and find a cure. He is accompanied by Gonzo, a hypochodriac dwarf, and Baldur, a Norse god cursed to appear as a lawn gnome. Cameron is pursued by the fire giants, who wish to kill him, but thankfully has the help of punk angel Dulcie to find his way. It could all be a hallucination of his spongifying brain... or maybe it's real. And maybe it doesn't matter if it is or isn't.

Libba Bray skewers social norms with satire and sheer oddity without harping on them, which works better than you'd ever guess. The book mocks materialism and prosperity gospel and religious cults and sexual obsession, all while admitting that we seek those things to cure a very real emptiness in our lives. Death is a real presence, not a romantic plot device. Cameron is authentic, funny, and strange as hell. It's a smart, funny, and (have you caught on yet?) WEIRD book. Its notable failures come in an excessive amount of set-up (100+ pages) and the need for stronger editing (at a 500+ page finish).

Verdict: A complex, unusual story that exceeds Libba Bray's previous work and deserves the accolades.