The troubled heroine of The Freak Observer reminded me a little of myself in high school. I tended toward the dark and sarcastic when I was a teenager because I was trying to be cool. Loa, on the hand, is not cynical because she's grumpy; she has actual PTSD. When the book begins, she's suffered not just one, but two terrible losses--her baby sister, who dies of a rare genetic disorder, and her suicidal friend. And, actually, it's three losses if you count the sudden move of her debate partner.

So Loa is alone and psychologically not well. Her voice as a narrator was distinct, but I can't say I liked it. It just really bummed me out. I was also not a fan of the five or six nightmare sequences sprinkled in the narrative because I don't like fictional characters telling their dreams like that's supposed to explain them. Loa is self-aware enough to acknowledge that she feels menaced by death, so describing more than one of her dreams about the grim reaper was not necessary. Just creepy and skip-able.

As with [b:Nothing|6647312|Nothing|Janne Teller|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266804447s/6647312.jpg|6841835], though I didn't particularly love it, there is a lot to absorb here. Physics principles, for one. And how some families struggle to find a way to live. How tragedy affects a smart young girl. ( )

Okay, this won me over -- just when I got so fed up with the relentlessly sad life the narrator, Loa, is living (seriously, I just about lost it when the dog dies in the story), things start to improve for her; yes, it improves slowly, and it's only a little bit, a glimmer, but that's realistic and doesn't undercut all of the reasons for her PTSD and depression. Also, I love a non-linear, character-driven story, so the structure and the voice held me through the rough patches.

Still, if it wasn't for Woolston's writing, I never would have gotten past the first 90 pages. I don't normally enjoy reading such sad stories, and I can't really say I enjoyed this one . . . but I'm glad I finished it. It felt meaningful. There were just too many sharp, wry, observant passages I was marking off with sticky notes to stop reading, and I'm glad that the story ends on a quietly hopeful note.

This is the kind of book I will think about long after finishing and probably read again, to catch all the nuances I missed the first time around. *longer review later possibly*

Here's three of my favorite snarky quotations, which I couldn't resist including here (I marked a lot more of them, but the others are too long for me to want to type them out):

[On friendship] "All friendships are unequal. If they weren't, power couldn't get swapped back and forth. We would just hover in our self-contained envelopes producing everything we need and eating our own shit. 'Mmmm!' we would say, 'That's good shit.' And we would all be perfectly happy and immortal, like yeast." [p. 72]

[On her job working in the kitchen and dining room at the residential care center] "I did not have much in common with the cooks. I am not a widow, for example, and I've never found my husband pinned under the axel after the rig he was working on slipped off the blocks. I am not fascinated by whippets or Judge Judy or the guy in the blue and white trailer who is running a meth lab." [p. 101]

[On how nobody teaches about dreams in school] "There was that inspirational speaker who tore a phone book in half and told us to dream big, but his message had nothing to do with our dream life while we sleep. He was all about goals and, I guess, dislike for phone books." [p. 126]
( )

Loa's sister died of a congential condition, and her family is still trying to recover. Loa feels like the center of her world is gone and she, like her parents, must find her new position in the universe. ( )

There are some books that you do an unkindness to when you read them too fast. I think this might be one of those books. Although I love thinking about physics, especially the quantum kind, I don't have a physics brain. Or a math brain. Or a very practical brain in general. But I understand the need for patterns, if only in a metaphorical sense and appreciate the beauty inherent in science and scientific theories.
Loa Lundgren, the protagonist in Woolston's The Freak Observer, loves physics too for the same reasons. The difference is she actually understands what she is talking about. Yet her love of physics is not enough ballast to support her through the grief of losing her little sister, who was ill with a rare genetic mutation, and her family's inability to cope with it. Nor is it enough to help her through the death of her only friend which may or may not have been a suicide and her abandonment of her debate partner/friends with benefits who left her to go to a school in Europe. She has terrible nightmares and a growing obsession/fear of death, who she calls the bony man, but there's nobody there to help her. She must deal with her bad dreams, her fears, she must deal with everything on her own.

Sounds cheerful hey? I realize that this summary is enough to make most people run the other way. Don't. I think there's is more than meets the eye here. I have that sensation you get when you are walking down the street and you pass somebody you know but your reaction is so delayed that by the time you register their face you have already passed them.

Or does that only happen to me? I can be very slow on the uptake, clearly.

I hate to use these adjectives, but I think this book might be complicated and subtle. The reason I say might is because I am not sure...I read it so fast I think I missed a major theme which tied in tot he concept of the Freak Observer, which I also failed to grasp (and the internet doesn't have much on it either. An indecipherable abstract for a scholarly paper on the multiverse is about it. Googling Botzmann's brain helps though). I think this book might be about observing our world. Interpreting it and how the lenses of our own experiences/fears/emotional insanity can steer us wrong- we see signs and meaning where there is none and ignore the real stuff. I think. I might have to read it again.

Either way, I liked it. I liked how each chapter starts with either a physics problem , or an astronomy fact. I liked the character of Loa, so lost and vulnerable yet witty and tough. The boys in her life were also very original, complicated ands real- sort of the mirror image of John Green's girl characters, so bravo Woolston on that. There are also some laugh out loud moments. I think the book might wrap up rather quickly- at least it seemed to spiral into a conclusion a little too fast, where Loa goes from being not all right to all right pretty fast. Still. Good characters. Good insights. Good preoccupations with life, death, love, friendship and what the hell it all means. In a nutshell, good stuff. ( )

The Freak observer is a very unusual book, aside from the front cover. It is about a girl, Loa, who suffers from P.T.S.D, after her very young sister died of a genetic disease. This was worsened when her high school friend was killed in a car accident she was involved in. She is having many bad dreams, and screams in the night from the terrors she endured. She chooses not to sleep, so instead works herself till morning. Now that her friend is gone she spends much of her time stumbling through high school and her life. Most of her days are spent thinking the days through in random connections of thought. Her life takes more of a path when she is given an assignment as extra credit because she has not been keeping up with her academics, which she did not plan to. The significance of her extra credit assignment is that it must be a page about theoretical spawning of cosmic brains who observe the universe around them. This theory is based around the idea that there are and infinite amount of universes equally giving the chance that here are infinite possibilities to anything. Loa finds resemblance in this theory to her own life; she imagines that she is the observer to the world around her. She then spends her time evaluating any single event or occurrence, no matter what it may be. Throughout the novel many references are made to things that have previously been said, and turned into a humorous thought. In many cases Loa refers to a character who is not physically in the book, the "the bony guy". The bony guy is actually the grim reaper, because death seems to always creep on her life, but not hers specifically but on the people she cares most about. The book basically has no plot, but a very interesting start ad ending. The resolution to the story is how Loa pieces together postcards sent to her by a friend in Europe, and puzzles the pictures together to form a sort of tarot card collection. Loa then accepts through complete coincidence by these cards the fates of her friend and family, and is happy to be the observer of her own universe, a universe only she can learn to understand and accept.

My emotions on this book when i first read it were very mixed, I liked the explicitness in the book, and much fowl tongue was stressed throughout the novel. I also liked how the random events somehow made a story. Loa always had many thoughts buzzing around in her head; you could tell that the P.T.S.D has a major effect on Loa's decisions. Nut her family, are in too much of a financial struggle to have to worry about it. It is an interesting read, I wouldn’t insist reading it unless you have a certain taste in books. ( )