Butter

by Erin Jade Lange

Unable to control his binge eating, a morbidly obese teenager nicknamed Butter decides to make live webcast of his last meal as he attempts to eat himself to death.

• ISBN10: 1599907801
• ISBN13: 9781599907802
• Publish Date: 4 September 2012
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 3 August 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 296
• Language: English

Reviews

[Angie]

I've been wanting to read Butter forever, and I'm so glad that I finally did. It's heartbreaking, funny, disturbing, cute, and eye-opening. Butter is sixteen and weighs 423 pounds. He eats, and eats, and eats some more despite being told he needs to lose wait. He believes he's a lost cause, so why even bother? It's not like he's picked on at school. He's mostly just ignored, although the kids only ever call him by his nickname. But one day, that changes. He puts himself out there, only to have food thrown at him. Then Butter gets this idea. He doesn't want to live anymore, but he wants to go out with a bang. He decides that he's going to eat himself to death live on the internet on New Year's Eve.

Butter is a wonderful narrator. He's snarky and sarcastic, but there's also times when he lets us see how he's really feeling. He doesn't fit in anywhere, except in the world of music. But even then, he only plays his saxophone in the privacy of his own room. It's so easy to get caught up in his story, even when it took a turn for the worse. And the worst is when he starts getting excited about his "last meal" after the popular guys at school invite him into their fold. He's getting encouragement, he doesn't have to eat lunch alone, and he goes out to hang with kids from school. It's actually pretty sick how Butter only manages to make "friends" when they're waiting for him to kill himself.

Butter definitely broke my heart in places. Butter doesn't even realize that he's not a lost cause, and that it's up to him to make changes in his life. He blames his genetics--which is part of the problem--and his mom for feeding him all the time. He blames the kids at school for ignoring him and him having to fill the friendship hole with food. He even blame his friend Tucker from fat camp, who lost a lot of weight and is now leaving him behind. It took all of this fake friendship and a suicide attempt to make him see that he can make friends on his own (without being a sideshow) and he can lose the weight if he tries. It's all up to him.

I really enjoyed Butter. It's a sad subject, but it's told with a kind of lightness that it made it less depressing. I still think the way these kids react to Butter's declaration is totally sick and disturbing, but I also believed that they didn't think he'd go through with it. That he was just putting on a show, and they wanted to be part of it. I also liked that the author never got preachy about weight and obesity. Of course, she makes it clear that Butter's weight is not healthy and that it's causing him many health problems, but this story also didn't glamorize weightloss and being skinny. It was more about being physically and mentally healthy.

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.

[mbtc]

This story kept me reading. It's not a book I would expect to normally go to and I'm not sure I'd suggest it to anyone else, but it was well written and intriguing.

[Rowena]

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.