This review has been revised and can now be found at Exendable Mudge Muses Aloud. What an excellent book.

Friends, it would be difficult to overstate my vexation upon the finishing of this allegedly excellent tome. In an effort to emulate Mr. Sharp, I shall essay to enumerate the difficulties that beset me during those long days in which I did traverse the pages of the manuscript. A) My head ached in a most alarming fashion. B) A strange desire to hurl myself off a bridge, or some such other edifice of sufficient moment, possessed me.

I cannot in good conscience recommend this title, unless the pote More...

Good enough that I may replace my paperback with a hardbound copy. Classified as young adult fiction (perhaps only because of its young adult protagonist) this first volume of Octavian Nothing reads a bit like Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, only interesting, coherent, and with a discernible plot and character empathy. In addition to the action, set in the early U.S. Revolutionary War period, the major thematic material concerns Octavian's identity. He is simultaneously royalty and slave, collaborat More...

Octavian Nothing is a slave boy owned by a group of rationalist philosophers living in Revolutionary War-era Boston. Slowly, we learn that Octavian's upbringing, characterized by a rigorous classical education and musical training (in which he excels) regular measurment of such bodily functions as his bowel movemements, are all part of a disturbing experiment to determine whether or not people of African descent are inferior to whites. Octavian comes to realize this as well, and in the course of More...

I'm rather surprised that The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing should be marketed to a young adult audience. Surprised and a little bit saddened. Saddened because I think the book deserves better and surprised for similar reasons.

Octavian Nothing deserves an audience built of those who are thoughtful, empathetic human beings. And this is not the typical and immediate description by which one would first describe teenagers. Certainly there are exceptions, but those are young adults whom we wo More...

The Pox Party (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation #1)
by M.T. Anderson

series
tbr busting 2013
pub 2006
young adult
gothic
fraudio
slaves
hist fic
winter 2012/2013
eugenics

This is really good, however I have had to make notes of the numerical codes for the characters.

A chilling slant on slavery and the American Civil war couched in modern spin.

4* Feed
4* The Pox Party

This is an amazing book--an exploration of some of the contradictory philosophies behind the American Revolution and a compelling coming-of-age tale at the same time. Dark and difficult, but well worth the attention.

There are some excellent books about slavery in the US that "tell all the truth but tell it slant." That is, they depict the institution in some other way than through its archetypal manifestation in the public imaginary: a large white-owned Southern plantation in the several decades prior to the Civil War. This is one of them. (Another is The Known World.) Here we have a young African prince (or so his mother tells him) being raised by the wonderfully-named Novanglian College of Lucidity, a gro More...

In broad genre terms, it's a slave story, but it's a consummately weird one that flickers in and out of other genres and spheres of influence, the most notable encroachments being on the Gothic novel\* and the heroic literature of the American Revolution. The idea I keep turning around in my head is that it's in a complicated and fairly aggressive dialogue with some long-term trends in YA--correct me if you remember differently, but didn't most of the Revolutionary War novels largely ignore the More...

Winner of the 2006 National Book Award for Young People's Literature
Boston Globe-Horn Book Award (2007)
2007 Printz Honor

I read this book in early February of this year, but have been too timid to review it. Now, with my review of The Obama Revolution by Alan Schaffer-Kennedy being posted tomorrow, I thought it was a good time to throw my two cents into the dialogue of race and literature.

The first volume of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing is the story of a young boy in 1760s Boston. He More...

Okay, for those of you have read M.T. Anderson's OTHER fabulous book Feed, Octavian Nothing proves to be very interesting on a thematic comparison level. Feed is, of course, set in the distant future and depicts a very Brave New World-ish, anti-utopian warning about where we're going as a culture (and it ain't pretty, folks). Octavian Nothing, on the other hand, is set in New England during America's Revolutionary War. Both books are written in the style and vocabulary of the thoughts of its pro More...

Oh my god. I started this at my sister's house one night, then had to finish the pointless "Stolen Boy", so I just got back to it yesterday. I could not put the thing down. Each of the four sections was so intense and exciting and terrifying. And FINALLY: an author who messes with form in a minimalist way that has real purpose and expression. Take that, Dave Eggers! Take that, Jonathan Safron Foer or whoever! This book broke my heart every page. It deserves every award it has won and then some. More...

I was totally surprised by this book, having seen it about a million times at the library, and seeing it never get picked up no matter how much I put it on display, I didn't have that much interest in it. But it has a power that I completely didn't expect. It riled many emotion for me especially anger, and the book left me very angry at people in the past for being so fricken racist. Yay for the present. The book is written from the point of view mostly of an extremely erudite slave, and so the More...

I finally finished this on audiobook. I was wondering if I would have enjoyed this more if I had read it, but I don't think I would have. I think that it didn't help that this was an audiobook, and one of my complaints about the book is that it goes on and on incessantly about crap that doesn't really do anything for the plot or the enhancement of the characters. And the over-the-top period language drove me crazy by the end. I would have liked it better if all of the third person narration part More...

At first I didn't know what to think of this book. I was horrified but strangely compelled to continue reading this tale of a slave boy raised in an experimental fashion. By the end, my heart was completely captured and the following passage struck me in particular.

“They told me of substance and form; they told me of matter, of its consistency as a fluxion of minute, swarming atomies, as Democritus had writ; they told me of shape and essence; they told me of the motion of light, that it was the More...

This was an amazing book in so many ways, I'm so glad I picked it up. I understand that it is classified as YA...but believe me, it would more than hold it's own in the adult section as well. There are 4 sections, most of the first, second and fourth are the "manuscripts of the boy Octavian", and the language is rich and very much of the eighteenth century. Have a dictionary handy--I sure needed one quite often.

I was touched and outraged throughout all of Octavian's actual memoirs, but I thought More...

Anderson, M.T. 2006. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation: Volume 1: The Pox Party.

Let's see...what can I say about Octavian Nothing. It's an award-winning book--winner of the National Book Award, winner of a Printz Honor. It's historical fiction--set in the Colonies right before the American Revolution. It's more literary than your typical teen book--it's heavy in semicolons and rich in detail.

So what is so astonishing about the life of Octavian Nothing? Many things. More...

I could write two very different reviews of Octavian Nothing. There's the one where I gush and gush and practically drool over it - the raw emotion! the unexpected humor! Private Ev's letters! Then there's the one where I sing its technical praises - how finely it creates the atmosphere of another time, and the use of language, and how it is a fine, fine example of the powers of historical fiction, and how Mr. Anderson does not underestimate the abilities of the young adult, but rather shows the More...

This was a completely extraordinary book - thanks for sending it, Lacy! I'm struck again by the question of what exactly makes a YA adult book a YA book. Nothing in here, whether it's writing, topic, or style, seems "YA" to me - is it simply judged so because of the age of the central protagonist? Is it a marketing choice?

The book's structure captivate me from the very start, as the title page and chapter headings so beautiful recreate the style and form of eighteenth-century American pamphlets. More...

sweet jesus, i have never been so anxious for a book to be done as i was with this one. i listened to the audiobook and it just seemed interminable! ugh! the language is very…. gothic and high and oh, i just hated it! here’s the thing i’ve decided about m.t. anderson. he has really great premises to his books (like in “feed” where it’s in the future and everyone’s brains are jacked into the internet, or “game of sunken places” where two boys have to play a “game” to save the world, or this one w More...

In the name of science, men do ridiculous and emotionally-removed things in order to pursue a point. In the name of politics, men do horrible things and overlook their hypocrisy.

This was the first fictional slave narrative that I've really enjoyed in quite some time. Most historical fictions pre-dating the Emancipation Proclomation tend to go over the same old ground and are really just an excuse for a publisher to update their catalog with a new product. This book: totally and completely differ More...

This book should have won the Printz award. The writing is exceptional and the story is utterly compelling.

Octavian is an African prince, who lives in Colonial Boston at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Dressed in silks, educated and pampered by strange scientists who care for him and his mother, Octavian seems to lack for nothing. Until he discovers that there is one thing denied him—his freedom.

This amazing and unique story begins as an allegorical fable of the Enlightenment and conclud More...

I tried to read this book when it first came out and quit after about 50 pages. I decided to try listening to it instead and I am so happy that I did.

This is a remarkable and unique tale of Octavian, a slave in Boston as the Revolutionary War breaks out. He and his mother live with the scholars who make up the Novanglian College of Lucidity. Octavian is part of an experiment to determine if Africans and Europeans have the same capacity for learning. As the novel progresses I became more and more More...

I really enjoyed Octavian Nothing. However, it was not an easy book to read. It's the narrative of a slave named Ocatvian who, at first, does not know he is a slave because he has been raised as part of an experiment of the Novanglian College of Lucidity. When new backers arrive at the college, Octavian's life takes a much more sinister turn. The language is difficult and antiquated. It takes time for the reader to acclimate to it. The plot is complex and the characters unfold slowly. For all of More...

This book was probably the most intense "young adult" book I've read in years. Octavian is a young black boy, raised during the years preceding the American revolutionary war by a group of scientists who are studying whether or not "savages" can be civilised and trained to behave like white men. This book doesn't hold any punches simply because it's a young adult's book. It deals with slavery and the terrible things that mankind can inflict upon others with a brutal honesty that is made even mor More...

I'm a bit mixed about my rating for this book. Part of me wants to give it a four and part of me wants to just leave it as a three. The side arguing for a higher rating tells me that there are so many aspects of racism mentioned here that those living in the post-civil rights era are prone to forget, many of which still exist in some degree. As a note regarding society, both in pre-Revolutionary times and current day society, this novel definitely is a worthy read.

The story-telling basis of thi More...

read by Peter Francis James - As young adult fiction, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1: The Pox Party, as the full title goes, is pretty astonishing in its own right. Told first from the pov of a pre-Revolutionary War period slave living in Boston, then in epistolary form from the pov of a fellow soldier in the rebel militia group he attaches himself to, and then again from Octvian's pov, this is a side of that time period rarely presented in fiction, le More...