Going Bovine, by Libba Bray

Going Bovine is an amazing, heartbreaking, impossible book. How do you write a comedy about a dying teenage boy? Honestly, how do you do that? How do you write a road trip adventure that might not really be happening, and yet maintain tension and drama throughout? How do you turn a garden gnome into a dignified and heroic mythic warrior?

Impossible. And yet Libba Bray has pulled it off.

I made some entirely false assumptions about this book. One of which was that it was mainstream YA –...