Customer Reviews

The Freak Observer

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Blythe Woolston's first novel is cleverly written and captivating. The narrative character of Loa, is a complex, candid and often humorous one. Although Loa is a strong and extraordinary young woman with troubling nightmares, uncommon responsibilities and a shocking childhood past, she is still a girl easy to relate to and easy to love. Poignant and touching, this story has a natural and easy flow that sucks in the reader, making them desperate to know how it all turns out for poor Loa Lindrgren.

Brilliantly written, THE FREAK OBSERVER takes the reader on a journey through Loa's intriguing mind as she tries to deal with the events taking place in the present while making sense of her past. Told in the first person, the character's unique voice draws the reader in as Loa discloses challenging situations in her life and family. The full story gradually unfolds, building toward a satisfying resolution as Loa seeks to make sense of her life through a keen sense of observation, analysis, and emotion.

I was drawn to this book like the TV tells me girls my age are drawn to shoes; it's shiny, beautiful and overpriced.

The book itself really is beautiful. The art on the jacket and on the cover, the style; it's just really cool looking. Not a book that you buy to look good on your shelf, but to look good in your hand.

If someone had given me a synopsis of the book I wouldn't have read it. It is just about a short period of time in the lead's life beginning the day after she sees her friend being hit by a car. She is at the same time dealing with abuse and abandonment and social angst and school...this sounds horrible to me, but somehow I loved the book.

It was engaging and interactive. Woolston is clever and smart and pulls it all off natrually, this is very rare for mainstream fiction. Your comprehension of each page depends on your having read the next one. Really good.

Lucky me to hear Blythe Woolsten's acceptance speech for the ALA award for Debut Novel. Her prose there is as exacting and incisive as the book. No, Loa's not your typical teen, but she's struggling with a lot and her insistence on plowing ahead is so true to life for a withdrawn teenager, I loved her in spite of her unlikeable quirks. Here is the true talent of an author to create characters out of words and make them full-blown. Loa's so not cool, she's cool. The physics lab note intros to each chapter were clever and insightful, giving the everday story some added depth. While Loa seemed a little too distant from her pain, her perseverance endeared her to me, and I found the isolation purposeful and necessary for the story. Despite the tragedies, this is not a sad book, but hopeful. One in which teenagers and adults with an open mind can find insight into that terrifying gap between childhood and adulthood. A book I anticipate reading again.

As there are plenty summaries of the story itself, I will get straight to the basics to explain why I rated this book 3 stars.

Characterization, for one, is very one dimensional. Loa is portrayed as a very intelligent, rational teenager in high school who is very interested in science and physics. This was interesting and unique, however, I feel that it's the only part of her character - aside from the panic attack in class that occurs midway through the story - that is believable and draws the reader in. She isolates herself from everyone, even before the accident that gives her the beginnings of post-traumatic stress disorder. She is extremely emotionally stunted for most of the book, which may be a result of having to care for her younger sister who has an incurable disease and needing to stay in control of her life (emotions would present a threat to that control) but even when she is written to feel something, I never felt as if I were connecting with her.

Other characters, with the exception of Little Harold as another reviewer mentioned, are completely unlikeable. The only people from school that she gets remotely involved in friendships with are so flimsy, they're practically transparent. I felt that the only reason they existed was to fill pages as most of them had next to no importance for the storyline, including the very long entanglement with her debate partner who abruptly leaves and then sends cryptic postcards and gifts to Loa for months. The two male characters we're introduced to nearer the end of the story, have such little to offer that I only kept reading to get to the end.

Woolston's writing style is unique and I appreciate it but the fact that she skipped around so much in the beginning between her sister dying, her friend dying, and her present attempts to deal with it, did not piece together very well. The location of the story and the bleak weather, I think, set a dull mood to the story. I was not moved by the characters and I found a majority of the story lacked emotionality. If Woolston does write another book, I hope that she continues using amusing descriptions of mundane things (one of the reasons I gave 3 stars instead of 2) but she might try harder to connect with her readers, have them feel what her main character is feeling.

And, as a sidenote, as someone who has been struggling with PTSD for over ten years, I did not find that Loa's PTSD was entirely believable. Everyone goes through different methods of dealing with death (her constant nightmares and sleeplessness) and everyone who has PTSD doesn't suffer from the same symptoms but there is a certain degree of reality and emotionality that you can sense when reading about someone's PTSD. I don't know if Woolston was trying to protect younger readers but writing about it from arms-length will not do anything to reach younger readers who are looking to learn more about how others go through it or have a history of it themselves. If an author is going to have a character suffer from a disorder, I don't feel like they should keep it at such a distance. It's important so why act as if it's some annoying thing like a headache and not talk about it? The only point where I felt she even tried was during the aforementioned panic attack in which she did some slightly impressive cognitive processing.

If you do decide to read this book, don't expect very much depth.

It's not often that you find a YA book with a compelling female protagonist, and this is one. But it's not a "girls' book"; boys should find it interesting too. This is a book for any teen who has ever felt different or alone. Or is that redundant? With a non-linear plot-line, interesting science and math, and a sad yet optimistic story, this is a great read!

Loa, who has just lost a younger sister and a friend, navigates the worlds of high school and her family... all this interspersed with snippets of theoretical physics.

The narrator of this book had a very unique voice, which I liked. For example, in the library, she described the Dewey decimal system as "a ghetto for old books that couldn't just be put in the dumpster but weren't worth the trouble of assigning new numbers and moving to new shelves." She goes on to describe the "shelves of oversize books, exiled from their natural clans by their gigantism." I enjoyed that amidst her recounting of the last year of her life, there were these pockets of quirky description such as the above.

I liked Loa, which made it easy to be taken in by the book, and I found her world and her story interesting. At 3/4 of the way through the book, I still wasn't sure how it was going to end, but I found the ending satisfying. I would recommend this as a solid, but not at all ordinary, young adult novel.

All Loa got for her troubles was a smack upside the head with a toilet plunger. No "I'm soooo glad you are safe." No "I love you," just a dirty old plunger. "Same-ol, same-ol" in the Lindgren family. Her friend, Esther, had been splattered across the road by a truck. She could picture her running down the embankment and then . . . the driver was out in the road yelling and puking. The trooper had tried to console her in his own funny way by saying that some people ran toward an accident while others ran away. So what kind of person just froze in place and time? Her only consolation prize was that plunger and her father saying, "You could'a been the dead one." It wouldn't be very long before Loa probably wished she was.

Mrs. Bishop, the guidance counselor at school, wasn't much help and everyone else thought of her as "that dead girl's friend" and that simply wasn't cool. Loa had a "glitch in [her] brain" and in her dreams she saw Esther's heart in the laundry basket. She didn't want to sleep because she'd see that heart. Cleaning all night solved that, but she couldn't stay awake forever. They used to call it "shellshock," but now it's called PTSD. They gave Loa six weeks of "grief counseling" because of her screaming at night and nightmares that brought everything back. At the end of her counseling she was supposed to be all cured up, but she knew that Esther couldn't "be alive and dead at the same time like Schrödinger's imaginary cat." Esther was dead and that was that.

It used to be that everyone had their own little orbit around her younger sister, Asta. Now "there were pages missing from Asta's book" and everyone had to tend to her because she never walked, talked, and had to wear diapers. Even Little Harold's life evolved around her until "The Bony Guy" came to get her. Loa knew she had problems and knew that "At least 25 percent of trauma victims have repetitive dreams of the event with feelings of intense rage, fear, or grief," but when the heck was she going to recover from this funk? Was anyone ever going to look at her instead of seeing a dead girl in her eyes? Was the best she was going to get was a toilet plunger up the side of her head?

This is an amazingly funny, yet tragic story about Loa Lindgren, a girl who is suffering from PTSD. Loa is so into her own mind that her intellect isn't quite holding hands with reality. The story emanates from the inner reaches of her mind. We not only learn about her fears, but also in this tragicomedy we are treated to Loa's remarkable sense of humor. For example, when someone tells her to take care she claims she won't be responsible for her actions if she hears it again because she knows how to take care. "I can wash dishes, pull out slivers, sharpen a chainsaw, thaw out frozen pipes, pack a lunch, mop floors, serve five hot plates to a table, get poop out of little boy's underwear, and sterilize a nasogastric tube." I haven't read such a good YA novel in some time and had a hard time putting it down. If you want to read a stunning, well written tragicomedy, this is definitely the book to pick up!

Unable to put this novel down, I finished it in one long bite. It is phenomenal. Smart, sad, honest, gritty, and beautiful. I loved Woolston's odd yet apt connections and the way she refused to dumb anything down.

It's difficult to believe that this is Woolston's first book - I hope she has many more in her. This is a piece of writing I won't soon forget.

While the writing is brilliant, I didn't like the story or the majority of the characters. Loa, 17 is living a nightmare. She witnesses the traumatic death of her friend and lives in a household of anger and strangers. This death follows shortly after Loa's sister Asta died of Rhett's Syndrome at age 8. Asta's death left an irreparable hole in the family. Loa even introduces them as a family more prone to yelling that to hugging.

The problem with this family is that, save for Little Harold, they just don't seem to communicate. The parents even get angry at Loa when she is injured in a bicycle accident. Loa's father Big Harold is verbally abusive and Loa's mother sounds cold and unloving. Only Little Harold, 7 is loving and expressive. He is the only likable member of that household and one of the few likable characters in the book. Tenderhearted and kind, he cries over the plight of the poultry that are killed to feed the family.

Loa is a brilliant mathematician who views everything through the lens of physics. Her teachers are kind and supportive and you want to cheer their efforts. Despite Loa's PTSD, which is understandable considering the trauma she suffered when her friend Esther was killed, Loa tries to maintain her Mr. Spockian mask as she tries to sort out the issues that have cropped up in her life.

I tried to like this book, but just could not. Loa was not a likable character, despite the PTSD, which one would think would make her more sympathetic. I didn't like Loa's parents at all.