About midway through my three days at BEA I happened to be walking past one of the big publisher booths and I caught a snippet of a conversation. A middle aged man wearing a badge designating him as working for a publisher was talking to another middle aged man (I didn't catch a glimpse of his badge, nor the name of the publisher the first man worked for, I just caught the color of the badge) and was saying, in the pompous voice of grad students and college professors, there are just no good boo More...

Like, I suspect, many readers, I figured that David Foster Wallace's enthusiastic blurb probably meant it was at least OK, and I also have a soft spot for books about troubled kids in weird therapeutic environments. It was OK, at least. I found it too pared back for my taste, the writing too dry and the plot, such as it was, too meandering, larded with information and detail that seemed like it might become important but never actually became so. But some of this may be my problem: For example, More...

Benjamin has agreed to tour Roaring Orchards, not move in. So when it becomes obvious that his parents have duped him, he unleashes his fury all over the windshield of the family car. He kicks out the front window and is eventually restrained by the staff. The upstate home for troubled youth covers the gamut of troubles. Benjamin’s own: two suicide attempts. The wild-child resumes of his peers are more colorful and range from a spending spree with dad’s credit card to the therapist-friendliness More...

The most fascinating element of That's Not a Feeling comes from its blurb. Because these are being regarded as DWF's last words, in regards to a successor or some such, the book you open up could not be more overcharged and biased towards it. For those who have read Infinite Jest, a far more ambitious but still by no means a revolutionary novel, TNF is an easy pill to swallow. Here's some water for you.

No character is held in its gaze for more than a chapter at a time and sometimes not even the More...

This book takes place at a school for troubled youth that felt like a combination of the last two places I worked at - a school for special needs kids with behavior challenges and a children's psychiatric ward that was in the middle of the woods. I felt like that familiarity made me more critical of this book. It wasn't a bad story. There were a lot of characters and it was hard to keep track of everyone and really get attached to any character. Even the protagonist/narrator was hard to feel att More...

A taste for the absurd will serve you well when reading this book. We follow Benjamin as his parents drop him off at a home for troubled teens in upstate New York - Roaring Orchards. The narration of this story has characters voices bleeding into one another at any given time. The first few times I stumbled and it took a minute to realize that this was a new voice. As the book progresses either I became more used to it or the technique is not used as frequently. I'm not sure if it made things mo More...

We meet Benjamin smashing his feet into the cracked windshield of his parents Oldsmobile. And he isn't even put into the violent kids group at The Roaring Orchards School for Troubled Teens. Benjamin has been suicidal in the past, but it seems like any kid can be thrown into this jigsaw puzzle of a mansion, just as long as someone pays tuition. Benjamin is writing his story fifteen years after getting out of the school, when he visits the decaying and molding mansion, left abandoned. Aubrey star More...

I worked for 3 years at a (well-run)Residential Treatment program,and work now at a school for students with "emotional and behavioral disorders," which obviously is why I was interested in this book. Though of course the book was a distopian satire, it rang very true with my experience of places like this. The seemingly smallest details-- such as the reference to individualized education programs and the campus-specific lingo like "sheeting" and "cornering"-- are what made the story ring so tru More...

I got this book via Netgalley so it is not actually out to everyone yet.

Personally, I think you have to like reading a certain kind of book (i.e. books they make you read in high school) or have a certain penchant for books that just narrate and don't create atmosphere or feeling to enjoy this book.

My last page thoughts were, wtf? Really? What happen to everyone, are they sane, not sane, did they survive into adulthood to make something of themselves or not, I just didn't get it. What was the More...

Dan Josefson has created a dystopian school amid the traditional world of private schools. "That's Not a Feeling" takes place at Roaring Orchards, a boarding school for troubled kids. In an otherwise idyllic setting, Roaring Orchards, the school, is purgatory.

There is no real curriculum. There is no real adult around. The students are put into levels and different punishments on a whim. The cast of characters is wide, each with a highly unusual, negative trait.

The main character, Benjamin, was t More...

Touching and funny and ruthlessly mocking of new age adults and their strategies for coping with acting-out teens. The narrator is a teen who kicks out a window of his parents car when he realizes they're dropping him off at this horrible rural school for troubled teens. The students' coping methods are funny, sad, well-chosen. A bit shaggy-baggy structurally, felt very 70s in some ways. The overall structure is sort of Cuckoo's Nest - he finds out the truth about the students and their keepers More...

I loved "That's Not A Feeling" I usually do not read books like this. My boss, at the bookstore I work at got it before it was released, and she asked me to read it. If I liked it should would get copies to sell at the store. I completley recomend the book. For someone like me who reads mostly paranormal books, and romance books this was a very different change of pace. It was a little hard at frist to understand who's story was being told at what time, but the further I got into the novel the e More...

I was a Goodreads first reads winner of this book.i would give this an almost three. there were some good parts but i had a hard time getting into this story. Benjamin is the lead character of this story That's NOT a Feeling. He is dropped of to a boarding school called Roaring Orchards. this is a therapeutic school for teenagers who have different problems. Benjamin is there because he tried to commit suicide twice. all the kids there have issues.one of the students is Tidbit a girl with many i More...

When this book came in at the library, my boss and I looked at the cover, and the peculiar title, and tried to figure out what the book was about. We came up with our own plot. It didn't really come close to the actual plot, but I think it would have been a better book.

That's Not a Feeling is about Benjamin, a new student brought to Roaring Oaks, a school for troubled teens. Roaring Oaks is run by a charismatic, and clearly crazy man named Aubrey. These kids are subjected to any number of weird More...

I couldn't quite grasp what the story was about and lost interest around page 150. I get that Aubrey is an odd character with the gift to make the illogical, logical by taking in kids with problems from suicide, willfulness, mental disorders, that their parents can't help and making them into something by showing them the error of their ways. Yet, Aubrey is really the only one who understands what goes on at Roaring Orchards. Students want to escape or are punished, yet they are also given privi More...

I wanted so much to like this book. Roaring Orchards is a home for wayward children. The title refers to some off-beat teaching methods used by the headmaster, Aubrey. It seems that when a child is acting out, they must vocalize their feelings. And there are only eight authorized feelings they can have. No, they can’t feel shitty or like they want to die. They can be angry, sad, etc., etc. Anything else, they are told, is not a feeling.

The story opens with the main character, Benjamin, being dro More...

Hmm...I think that if I gave this book to the reluctant readers I used to work with, after five minutes they would have thrown it across the room in frustration. This story really plays with unreliable narration. It forces the reader to wonder how is it possible for Benjamin to know all of this. What’s truth and what’s fiction? Even though this is a retrospective story, Benjamin’s narration constantly shifts perspective, describing events from other points of view—events he couldn’t possibly hav More...

***Spoiler Alert***

When I saw the blurb from DFW on this book I was expecting it to be spectacular. It was good - probably really good - but my expectations were much higher. Josefson used so many of the elements I loved in a book. He has this way of walking that really fine line between horribly sad and hilariously funny. There are parts of this story that make no sense at the outset, and you wait the entire time for them to be resolved, but they never are. At that point, the only thing left to More...

I picked this book up kind of at random, off of either the employee's favorites or local authors shelf at the bookstore when I was rage purchasing books. I had no expectations going in, I wasn't even all that sure what it was about. And I loved it. It's a character driven book about teens at a boarding school for troubled youth in upstate New York. The book is told from a students point of view, and it's immediately clear that the adults here have just as many problems, if not more, than the kid More...

It was difficult to get into the flow of the book in the beginning. I am not in the mental health profession and do not understand most of these behaviors,but after my own son refused to come home, I did start reading more books about teens or written by teens to help me understand what happened. This book was written about the author's time spent in a troubled teen facility. It gave me great insight into the heart of these teens and the way the System works.

In researching too many of these cent More...

This book was surreal. In parts it was so hilarious and in others it was sad. The school is supposed to be therapeutic environment for disturbed children, but in most cases it is the adults that are disturbed. This book is brilliant in that it has so many scary boundaries that the adults enforce, including manipulating the children's parents, harsh punishments for the kids and brainwashing for the teachers and room parents. Kind of like Jim Jones and his kool-aid in a book. Very intellectual rea More...

Did you ever get the feeling that your parents abandoned you? I sure as shit did. One time, my parents dropped me and my brother off at our aunt’s house so that she and my father could hit the town for a night of drunken debauchery. This would have been well and fine had she left us anywhere else.

We didn’t have a whole lot of experience with that particular aunt. My mother’s other sister, the much more likely candidate for babysitting, was a favorite. But this one our mother had warned us about. More...

Benjamin and his parents arrive for a tour of Roaring Orchards, a boarding school/mental institution. Benjamin thinks it is just a tour anyway, but his parents had other plans and they leave him and his suicidal tendencies there. The director of the school has some original ways of dealing with these kids who are there for a variety of reasons and mental health issues, but none of them actually seems very appropriate or effective. The staff are also poorly trained and ineffective.

Really, don't s More...

I loved THAT'S NOT A FEELING. The book presents a sort of in-between world, where a lot of seriously dark stuff is going on, but everyone still lives life as best they can. It's a perfect fictionalization of the way (especially, although not exclusively) American culture produces some of the darkest media (video games, The Hunger Games), people constantly inured to savagery of many types, yet the ante keeps going up.

To what effect? THAT'S NOT A FEELING speculates, but for our part in reality we' More...

Our story begins with our narrator’s arrival at Roaring Orchards, a “therapeutic” boarding school in upstate New York. Benjamin has a history of suicide attempts and needs help, but Roaring Orchards is the last place he should be.

Founded by a complete kook, Roaring Orchards is, in a word, inexplicable. In fact, no employee can explain the school’s philosophy. Full of bizarre rituals and puzzling jargon, R.O. is no place for any child, troubled or otherwise.

Benjamin’s account of his experience is More...

Having experience working at a residential treatment facility I believe the author uncannily articulates the culture. Although, some aspects of the culture are exaggerated and uncomfortable while reading. The book is well written and presents like a first hand encounter. The characters are life like and are not a distant thought in a fantastical world. I thought the book was an excellent read about teenagers and the integration of psychological processes plus teenage angst. I give this book four More...

Sometimes a pull quote will trick you. Sometimes you'll be elbows deep in the tail-end of Infinite Jest baffled that any writer can pull of an, er, feat(?) of literature that dense and amazing and you'll start to think that anything you see with that author's pull-quote slathered across the page is going to be as stunning and original as that author's most-famed work. Realize now though good readers that pull quotes are, for the most part, nasty tricks and that if you're going to get yourself in More...

Because so many first-novels are coming-of-age tales, it is no great surprise that Dan Josefson’s That’s Not a Feeling follows the pattern. No, the real surprise here is how good this book is for a first effort. Within the confines of a boarding school for troubled teens called Roaring Orchards, the author creates a unique little world that is as appalling as it is funny – and he makes it all seem very real.

Although only those being completely honest with themselves would admit it, Roaring Orch More...

That’s Not A Feeling, by Dan Josefson, is the story of Roaring Orchards, a boarding school for troubled youth, and traces the experiences of Benjamin, a new student who encounters this strange world following two failed suicide attempts. After smashing out his parents windshield in the facilities parking lot, and believing he was ‘just on a tour,’ Benajamin’s parents leave him without a goodbye in the hands of staff who adhere to the school’s philosophy that few can explain or understand. The jo More...

This book is something I would recommend to a very specific reader. It's terrifying and sad and utterly bizarre, and it will make your feel like you've lost a little bit of your sanity when you're reading it. The writing has some really great literary moments, especially for a debut novel-- it doesn't feel like it's trying too hard.

From a publishing-seller side of things this book could be seen as a tough sell. It's unnerving and unusual. But, with the type of reader who likes books of this vein More...