Finished Butter by Erin Jade Lange. I received a copy from the publisher on Netgalley.
Butter is not happy. He’s a teenage boy and he weighs over 400 pounds. He’s so fat that everyone ignores him. He’s not picked on for the most part, which is good, but no one pays any attention to him at all. And then he’s had enough. He creates a website and says that he’ll literally eat himself to death on New Year’s Eve. All of a sudden, people are paying attention to him. Weird, right? But now people are being nice to him and he’s popular for the first time. But that doesn’t really help because he knows that one way or another, it’ll end on New Year’s Eve. Because he’ll either be dead or he’ll have backed out and everyone will hate him.
This is a really good book but it seriously broke my heart. Reviews I’ve read said that you empathize with Butter, obviously, but you also start to feel for the bullies. That may be true for some people, but I had no sympathy for the bullies. I have never been a fan of the mean people.
I was totally Team Butter. And reading this book, I had a complete feeling of dread while waiting to see if he’d go through with it. It was also heartbreaking to see how happy and actually grateful he was to have people be nice to him. Simply being noticed made him so happy.
So yes, this is a great book but again, it will probably break your heart.
