AnnaBnana's Reviews > Butter

Butter is a 423 high school junior and for someone so big, he is forever shocked at how invisibly he travels through the hallways of his high school. Butter fills his emptiness with food and cures his melancholy by playing his saxophone and with late-night Internet chats with the beautiful Anna, to whom his identity remains anonymous. It's not enough though. It's never enough and after a particularly bad day at school, Butter decides he's done. He creates a web site and shares with his schoolmates his intention to eat himself to death on a live-stream on New Year's Eve.

This book was distressing. There definitely is fodder for discussion here -- particularly on the topic of the bystanders in bullying situations. There's also a lot of really interesting stuff regarding Butter's relationships with the adults around him, which isn't always a topic dealt with deeply in YA lit. Overall, I thought this book was great. I think there was a danger of being heavy handed on the "lessons" as there always is in an issue book like this, but Lange largely avoided this trap.