Ok, this is now one of my favorite books!! What an awesome story!!! For our six-month anniversary, Morgan bought me a gift card to my favorite bookstore City Lights. I took a chance in getting Going Bovine, which took up the entire monetary worth of the gift card, because it had a cover of a cow carrying a lawn gnome and as I scanned the first page of a boy talking I thought to myself, "I like this kid." And, I'm so glad I bought this book!! It was hilarious, awesome, exciting, unable-to-put-downable.
In modern day Texas, a boy in high school is just trying to survive being an outcast. His parents are on a rocky road to divorce, his sister is Little Miss Perfect and dating the recently-turned ultimate Christian football player, and this boy... Cameron... just wants out. Then, he founds out he has the human version of mad cow disease.
Every page is a laugh! Every chapter has a new adventure. Every moment you fall more and more in love with these crazy, multi-layered characters. Some of my favorite moments include the gang making up their own sarcastic bumper stickers:
"My honors student sells drugs to your honors student."
"I know you're stalking me."
"Please don't tailgate: body in trunk"
"Quantum physics has a problem of major gravity" (292).
Says Cameron as they near the end of their journey: "We sit staring out at that vast ocean, Gonzo and I, just watching the sky colors drip into the sea like a giant percolator, making something sweet and strong, something to keep you going when all you've got left are fumes.
"Maybe there's a heaven, like they say, a place everything we've ever done is noted and recorded, weighed on the big karma scales. Maybe not. Maybe this whole thing is just a giant experiment run by aliens who find our human hijinks amusing. Or maybe we're an abandoned project started by a deity who checked out a long time ago, but we're still hardwired to believe, to try to make meaning out of the seemingly random. Maybe we're all part of the same unconscious stew, dreaming the same dreams, hoping the same hopes, needing the same connection, trying to find out, missing, trying again - each of us playing our parts in the others' plot lines, just one big ball of human yarn tangled up together. Maybe this is it...
"We've left the moment. It's gone. We're somewhere else now, and that's okay. We've still got the other moment with us somewhere, deep in our memory, seeping into our DNA. And when our cells get scattered, whenever that happens, this moment will still exist in them. Those cells might be the building block of something new. A planet or star or a sunflower, a baby. Maybe even a cockroach. Who knows? Whatever it is, it'll be a part of us, this thing right here and now, and we'll be a part of it.
"And if it's a cockroach? Well, that will be the happiest f***ing cockroach on the planet. I can tell you that" (434-346).
Works cited from:
Bray, Libba. Going Bovine. New York: Delacorte Press, 2009. Print.
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