Butter in Anti Bullying Week Readathon

Jan 01, 2015 Shelly rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I have a lot of thoughts i'll come back too. I enjoyed the first 90% of this intensly, i felt the ending was a little......i dunno yet. ...more

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Nov 18, 2014 Ren rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2014, ownership-status-donated-etc, the-future-the-liberals-want, its-not-you-its-me, heavy-sigh, get-urself-to-the-butterfly-lounge

**3.5 STARS.

This was a good novel, and I do think that it's good at delivering its message. However, while I recognise and respect things and in some ways I liked this, I ultimately didn't like the experience of reading this. It was depressing and upsetting frustration-inducing, and it was all of these things in ways that felt connected to my own life, so it was hard to genuinely enjoy this. While that is sometimes a reasonable reaction to reading about a hard topic, it felt inexplicable differe **3.5 STARS.

This was a good novel, and I do think that it's good at delivering its message. However, while I recognise and respect things and in some ways I liked this, I ultimately didn't like the experience of reading this. It was depressing and upsetting frustration-inducing, and it was all of these things in ways that felt connected to my own life, so it was hard to genuinely enjoy this. While that is sometimes a reasonable reaction to reading about a hard topic, it felt inexplicable different this time, perhaps because it was more personal and also arguably slightly less intentional. This novel is written in a way that makes me feel like I am supposed to gain at least a bit of enjoyment from it, and I didn't, I just got negative emotions. Most of them were not the 'I thoroughly dislike this', disconnected types of emotions that I experience with books I consider my least favourites. but instead they were negative feelings born of negative situations in the book, but this doesn't mean that reading this was not a generally negative experience for me, and my rating reflects that.
A related issue is that I PERSONALLY couldn't connect very much to the characters. Butter bothered me because he was constantly judgemental of everyone else, despite hating people judging him, and I'm not saying this isn't realistic, I just personally found it frustrating. And the other characters, Anna, Tucker, his mother, his father, his 'friends', they were all weak or annoying or selfish in several ways and again, it was realistic, but I found the novel a little frustrating and hard to connect to because there were no characters that I liked, except probably the Professor and maybe even Doc Bean, but they were both pretty solidly background characters. I often enjoy reading about unlikable characters, but when the rest of the novel is also making me feel bad and upset and uncomfortable, the unlikable characters did little but add to my negative reading experience.
Plus, and this is somehow simultaneously the biggest and also the smallest issue I had here, the actual way this book deals with weight is... I'm really not sure how to explain it or how I feel. I really appreciated that it showed just how much thin people hate and dehumanise and blame fat people, and how much disgusting cruelty is heaped upon fat people, especially people who are this level of obese. This novel, for the most part, really does not let thin people and society at large off the hook. That was good. However, it's hard to say this book dealt with any of this well, because by making Butter so unlikable and giving him such a weird, inconsistent attitude about food, and by populating the story with an almost entirely thin cast other than him, it doesn't exactly do a whole heap to combat those shitty attitudes about weight or fat people. More than anything else, whether this novel is technically realistic and whether or not it delivers its message successfully, this book would be utterly toxic and damaging for anyone fat or who actually does struggle with their weight. This is a wider topic for discussion, are there reasons to write and ways to justify writing about marginalised people that, while well-meaning and with a decent message, are not actually able to be read by people in that marginalised group? There are plenty of pieces of media that make me ask this question, but this one sticks out as a very big one.
I think this is a case of 'it's not you it's me'. But that isn't to say I actively dislike it, because I don't, of course. It was poignant and emotional and a good anti-bullying book, I just personally can't reconcile how much negativity this book made me feel.
I came back to this review later, and would like to note that I ultimately donated this novel because seeing it on my shelf was still giving me negative feelings years later. So this novel and I are really not friends. ...more

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