Fiction

Being on the Wrong Side of Book Buzz

Brenna Clarke Gray

Staff Writer

Part muppet and part college faculty member, Brenna Clarke Gray holds a PhD in Canadian Literature while simultaneously holding two cats named Chaucer and Swift. It's a juggling act. Raised in small-town Ontario, Brenna has since been transported by school to the Atlantic provinces and by work to the Vancouver area, where she now lives with her stylish cyclist/webgeek husband and the aforementioned cats. When not posing by day as a forserious academic, she can be found painting her nails and watching Degrassi (through the critical lens of awesomeness). She posts about graphic narratives at Graphixia, and occasionally she remembers to update her own blog, Not That Kind of Doctor. Blog: Not That Kind of Doctor Twitter: @brennacgray

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silence of bonaventure arrowErmagerd, you guys, please could the internet SHUT UP about The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow?

I don’t know if Bonaventure blew up your social media this week, but it sure lit mine on fire. I read an ARC of this sort of faux-spirituality novel about a boy who, in being unable to speak, is able to teach the world a lot about listening (that was in my saccharine tone). The narrative voice is really quite interesting, and if you have a different political stripe to mine you may love the book, but HOLY HELL did I not enjoy it. Without spoiling anything, the way the novel handles abortion-as-defining-plot-point was beyond stomach churning to me. If you want pro-life rhetoric in your fiction, fill your boots, but it was a bit much for me.

Goodreads says I’m STUPID AND WRONG (ok, not really, but it does say 95% of people liked this book) and the only one-star review? Yeah, that’s definitely me.

I was prepared to be alone in my discomfort with the novel, especially being self-aware enough to know that some of my unhappiness is values-motivated. But then my Twitter feed went MENTAL. I think I got stuck between two competing blog-tours/twitter-party extravaganzas. I swear every time I checked any social media there was a new something about the delight of Bonaventure.

And I suddenly realized how book buzz can backfire. Because the more I read about how OMG THIS IS THE BEST BOOK EVA the more I dug in my heels of hatred. Now I wasn’t just not sure the book was for me. I was fully certain that it is the worst book in the history of ever. If this novel had a face, I would punch it.

Ah, internet.  Is there anything you can’t polarize?

This is a new experience for me. Normally I at least kinda dig on the things that people are into. And I don’t normally feel this disconnected and separated from my beloved bookish internet. Like, okay, I didn’t super-love Twilight, but let’s face it, it was totally cool not to super-love Twilight (and on GoodReads, Twilight is only 77% beloved); in fact, hating on Twilight was its own kind of bookish buzz for a while. This is different. I am standing alone on a big rock in the ocean proclaiming that I hate-read a book everyone else seems to have loved. Devotedly loved.

I am on the wrong side of a cultural phenom and I do not like it sir.

Have you ever been on the wrong side of book buzz?