Going Bovine & The Opposite of Loneliness

This week for my book review, I am posting my thoughts on both of the books that I recently finished. These books are both incredible, so I couldn’t write about just one or the other. I hope that you enjoy reading my thoughts about them and maybe even get inspired to read one of these fantastic books.
Bray, Libba. Going Bovine. New York: Delacorte, 2009.
                I am starting this review with Going Bovine because if you have looked at my “Books” page (which has all the books that I have read this trimester in the order that I have read them) I started reading this book quite a while ago. I actually started reading it in the beginning of December and didn’t get to finishing it until just now. I am going to start by saying that this is a longer book but is most definitely worth your time. Going Bovine is about a high school kid named Cameron. He is bored and sick of his same old school and same old town. He is starting to think that nothing will ever change for him when he suddenly diagnosed with mad cow disease. At this point his life starts to spin out of control. He starts having hallucinations and sometimes he can’t even control his body anymore. He has given up on living and accepted that he cannot be saved. But while lying in the hospital he is visited by Dulcie, an angel with pink hair. Dulcie tells him that he can be saved by a man called Dr. X, and that he needs to not only save himself, but save the world. This gets him started on the wildest adventure of his life. His only companions are a dwarf that he met in the hospital, a yard gnome that claims to be a god, and the angel who sent him on his quest. And on Cameron’s journey to escape from death, he actually lives for the first time in his life.

 Keegan, Marina. The Opposite of Loneliness. New York: Scribner, 2014.
                This is super different than the book that I mentioned above. This is a collection of essays and stories written by a Yale student named Marina Keegan. The first half of the book is fiction and is a selection of stories about happiness, sadness, love, and life in general. Each story is incredibly different and every character feels original. Then there are the essays. Each one is new, different, and interesting. Each is a topic that you would never think to write or read about. Yet they each carry with them a unique attitude and thought. Some are more personal than others, talking about Marina’s car. Yet others can be connected with by anyone like the essay that she wrote about why we care about the whales. This was a wonderful book of short writing pieces, but I would still like to say one more thing just so you are aware. In 2012, five days after Marina’s graduation from Yale, she was killed in a car crash. For me it makes it even more powerful that she ends her essay Song for the Special with the words “Sometime before I die I think I’ll find a microphone and climb to the top of a radio tower. I’ll take a deep breath and close my eyes because it will start to rain right when I reach the top. Hello, I’ll say to outer space, this is my card.”