(Finished April 25, 2015)
Butterball is a 13-year-old playground bully who has just
landed another kid in the hospital. And he's absolutely not interested in
telling his therapist, an out-of-touch white lady, what happened and why. His
mom has made him move to Long Island with her when all he wants to do is live
in the City with his dad, nobody will leave him alone about his weight, and he
pretty much has nothing to say to anybody.
I started reading this book with almost literally no idea
what to expect. I was being a good librarian and deliberately reading outside
of my wheelhouse. When I walked over to the Young Adult section, this book
happened to be displayed with its very eye-catching cover facing out. So I
picked it up, read the teaser on the back, and decided to go for it.
It turned out to be completely engaging—at first because the
narrator manages to be such a complete idiot and yet display this intriguingly
sharp, dry sense of humor, and then because I wanted to know what had happened
on that playground, and then because I needed to know why and what would become
of him. Little drawings throughout gave me a sense of what Butterball's world
looks like to him. This, and the richness, realness, and effortless-seeming naive
charm of Butterball's narrative of his own life, kept me right there with him—when
being a mom of a teenager, and a white lady of a certain age, might have
tempted me to empathize more with his mom or with his therapist.
This is a quick read that reminds you what trauma can do to
kids, what their resilience looks like from within, and that there is such a
thing as redemption. Highly recommend.
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