Oh, but this book had so much potential! Unfortunately, BUTTERs casual treatment of its characters actions and motivations lessened the quality of what could have been a thought-provoking YA contemporary novel on the highly relevant issues of bullying, obesity, and body image.
The main character, Butter, is a likable guy. Any reader, male or female, who has experienced adolescent insecurities in any form will want to reach out to him, to let him know that he is not alone. Deep down he really is a gentle soul with a heart of gold, one who has unfortunately been the victim of a narrow-minded and apathetic society.
Unfortunately, reader sympathy or empathy for the main character is not enough to pull the story out of the quagmire of shallowness that is BUTTER. The characters in this book are actors playing out the roles assigned to them: concerned but clueless mother, bromantic popular guys at school, etc. The dialogue in this book has the hollow ring of artificiality with its high school stereotypes, and this overreliance on stock characters leads to BUTTERs biggest problem: the unbelievability of events as natural offshoots of characters motivations.
Take, for instance, Butters newfound popularity in the wake of his announcement that he is going to commit suicide by overeating. I totally get how society would make people who make outrageous statements or do outrageous things famousor, more likely, infamous. We latch onto celebrity gossip as if wed die if we dont know whos dating who or what hijinks the latest child star-turned-rehab fixture has gotten into. But as much as well read about their exploits, would we really want to be friends with people like Nadya Suleman or Kate Gosselin or Levi Whats-His-Name? Would we even want to call them our acquaintances? While Butter may be seeking attention on a different level than these celebrities, there are some similarities to their situations and mindsets. Which is why Butters popular schoolmates acts of pulling him into their group felt somehow off to me. What was their motivation for befriending him? Is that really how people would act toward an (in)famous celebrity?
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that Butter, too, did not escape the novels inattention to characters motivations. Butter is likable, but I also found it difficult to fully understand the train of logic that took him from lonely and overlooked outsider to posting a dramatic suicide plan on the Internet. Then, as Butters overnight fame drew him ever more into his own mess, I continued to have trouble believing his explanations for why he continued to keep the pretense up. Butters emotions and actions zigzagged back and forth in dizzyingly quick turns that I found difficult to keep up with. Eventually, I kind of just sat back and skimmed the rest of the book, resigned to the fact that I would never fully understand Butter and thus be unable to ever fully empathize with him. And when the conclusion finally came, rushed and ambiguous and contrived, I was left confused, astonished at how cleanly things were realized and tied up with a pretty little bow. There was so much potential in the number of complex layers this book could have explored, but instead, it decided to flatten it into the shape of a typical YA tale, of mistakes and poor decisions made and cleanly resolved at the end.
BUTTER took a great concept and made it a victim of amateur writing and a seeming lack of understanding of human motivations. It left a minimal impression on me, and its mixed messages will probably be forgotten completely in a few weeks, quickly collecting dust.
The main character, Butter, is a likable guy. Any reader, male or female, who has experienced adolescent insecurities in any form will want to reach out to him, to let him know that he is not alone. Deep down he really is a gentle soul with a heart of gold, one who has unfortunately been the victim of a narrow-minded and apathetic society.
Unfortunately, reader sympathy or empathy for the main character is not enough to pull the story out of the quagmire of shallowness that is BUTTER. The characters in this book are actors playing out the roles assigned to them: concerned but clueless mother, bromantic popular guys at school, etc. The dialogue in this book has the hollow ring of artificiality with its high school stereotypes, and this overreliance on stock characters leads to BUTTERs biggest problem: the unbelievability of events as natural offshoots of characters motivations.
Take, for instance, Butters newfound popularity in the wake of his announcement that he is going to commit suicide by overeating. I totally get how society would make people who make outrageous statements or do outrageous things famousor, more likely, infamous. We latch onto celebrity gossip as if wed die if we dont know whos dating who or what hijinks the latest child star-turned-rehab fixture has gotten into. But as much as well read about their exploits, would we really want to be friends with people like Nadya Suleman or Kate Gosselin or Levi Whats-His-Name? Would we even want to call them our acquaintances? While Butter may be seeking attention on a different level than these celebrities, there are some similarities to their situations and mindsets. Which is why Butters popular schoolmates acts of pulling him into their group felt somehow off to me. What was their motivation for befriending him? Is that really how people would act toward an (in)famous celebrity?
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that Butter, too, did not escape the novels inattention to characters motivations. Butter is likable, but I also found it difficult to fully understand the train of logic that took him from lonely and overlooked outsider to posting a dramatic suicide plan on the Internet. Then, as Butters overnight fame drew him ever more into his own mess, I continued to have trouble believing his explanations for why he continued to keep the pretense up. Butters emotions and actions zigzagged back and forth in dizzyingly quick turns that I found difficult to keep up with. Eventually, I kind of just sat back and skimmed the rest of the book, resigned to the fact that I would never fully understand Butter and thus be unable to ever fully empathize with him. And when the conclusion finally came, rushed and ambiguous and contrived, I was left confused, astonished at how cleanly things were realized and tied up with a pretty little bow. There was so much potential in the number of complex layers this book could have explored, but instead, it decided to flatten it into the shape of a typical YA tale, of mistakes and poor decisions made and cleanly resolved at the end.
BUTTER took a great concept and made it a victim of amateur writing and a seeming lack of understanding of human motivations. It left a minimal impression on me, and its mixed messages will probably be forgotten completely in a few weeks, quickly collecting dust.
