From the author of the Gemma Doyle trilogy and The Diviners series, this groundbreaking New York Times bestseller and winner of the Michael L. Printz Award for literary excellence is "smart, funny, and layered," raves Entertainment Weekly.
All 16-year-old Cameron wants is to get through high school—and life in general—with a minimum of effort. It’s not a lot to ask. But that’s before he’s given some bad news: he’s sick and he’s going to die. Which totally sucks. Hope arrives in the winged form of Dulcie, a loopy punk angel/possible hallucination with a bad sugar habit. She tells Cam there is a cure—if he’s willing to go in search of it. With the help of a death-obsessed, video-gaming dwarf and a yard gnome, Cam sets off on the mother of all road trips through a twisted America . . . into the heart of what matters most.
From acclaimed author Libba Bray comes a dark comedic journey that poses the questions: Why are we here? What is real? What makes microwave popcorn so good? Why must we die? And how do we really learn to live?
"A hilarious and hallucinatory quest."—The New York Times
"Sublimely surreal."—People
"Libba Bray's fabulous new book will, with any justice, be a cult classic. The kind of book you take with you to college, in the hopes that your roommate will turn out to have packed their own copy, too. Reading it is like discovering an alternate version of The Phantom Tollbooth, where Holden Caulfield has hit Milo over the head and stolen his car, his token, and his tollbooth. There's adventure and tragedy here, a sprinkling of romance, musical interludes, a battle-ready yard gnome who's also a Norse God, and practically a chorus line of physicists. Which reminds me: will someone, someday, take Going Bovine and turn it into a musical, preferably a rock opera? I want the sound track, the program, the T-shirt, and front row tickets."—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Going Bovine can be summed up in one word: bizarre. It’s random and weird and crazy, but in a way that you can tell is fully intentional. It feels like Libba Bray knew what she was doing with each word, making sure they created the exact story she wanted to tell, even if it was super strange.
SPOILERS TO FOLLOW....
At nearly five hundred pages the novel is long and baggy; too much is focused on Cameron’s road trip fever dream. The family isn’t well established enough in the novel proper for us to mourn Cameron’s death or to experience their reactions. Bray scorns censorship, the self-esteem movement, and enforced positivity and happiness. Bray could have written a good dystopian work on identity and reality instead of a novel about an untimely teen death and the desperation to live if only in dreamland.
