feelings about this book are complex, I want to talk to other people I know who have read it, but due in part to the subject matter, I would also have a hard time exactly recommending it to people.
It's dark, though not dour, and it both deals with trauma as a story element AND happens to coincide with reallife trauma that shows up in the news again and again.
But I gave it five because I read more than half of it in a single day, I couldn't stop myself from going back to it,
A complicating factor here is that I've been a reader of Cadre's blog for over a decade, and just now got around to his novel.
While I don't know his life story, I do know some of the personal things he's shared there, and I can project some of the ways they might have shaped this story it's difficult for me to divorce the writer from the writing because of that strong parasocial impression.
Some of the protagonist's issues and limits of perspective seem deliberate markers of his gender, age and circumstance, And some of the material that made me uncomfortable is, I think, an argument on behalf of the authoran argument about reexamining the American culture of relationships, particularly within families.
Between those two things is a subtle gray area that I found tricky to navigate,
The argumentative material provoked a lot of thought, The teenageboy perspective provoked a familiar discomfort, I don't think either of those is bad! But because of their overlap, and because of my own limits of perspective, it seems like a wholehearted endorsement of the book would carry connotations that would concern me.
I don't know, I'm glad I read it, and people don't seem to have a problem recommending, like, Lolita, But Ready, Okay! deserves to be handled with care: it's loaded, I first heard about author Adam Cadre through his work in interactive fiction computer games like Zork, and I was so impressed with the creativity of his own text adventures that when I heard he had a novel published, I immediately grabbed a copy.
I was not disappointed.
The narrator of Ready, Okay! is Allen Mockery, an extremely gifted teenager from a family of extremely gifted children, who lets the reader know up front that he is documenting the months leading up to a disaster that will claim many lives.
Published shortly after the Columbine massacre, it doesn't take Long to figure out what's coming, but that doesn't take away from the novel's guided tour through the trials and tribulations of a high school student's life, and the humorous yet touching struggles involved in these tumultuous time of life for those who are unavoidably "different" like Allen and his brothers and sisters.
For those looking for a more serious examination of the causes behind school shootings such as Columbine, I would recommend looking elsewhere, such as Jim Shepard's Project X.
Not because Cadre's novel does not take these events seriously, but only because some of the fantastic characters and events within the novel are separated enough from reality so that the Columbine aspects are more a part of the story than the reason or overall message.
The scope of Cadre's novel is a bit larger than that, and so the reader should definitely expect more,
There are some that might consider Ready, Okay! a young adult novel, but even though the main characters are teens, I get the feeling that Cadre did not write this just for a teen audience, but rather for anyone who will listen, because he really does have something to say that's worth listening to, or at least reading.
The author emailed me about and edition and asked if I was interested in reading it so of course I said "yes"! This book was one of my favorites years back when I read the first edition so I was interested to see what reading it a second time would be like.
I already knew how it ended, and it's kind of given away from the first page but because it had been so long I had forgotten the details.
I didn't cry this time but rather found it a little difficult to empathize with the main character because it is so ingrained in his persona to make a joke out of everything even though that does not mean he doesn't feel things he just never lets people know and would rather have others make his decisions for him which I can kind of relate too.
I think the family dynamic was definitely stranger to me the second time around as well but I also had to suspend my disbelief in that the main character could so suddenly come around and see things from his sisters p.
o. v. when he never really seemed like a very empathetic character,
Regardless, I don't really know where I'm going with this, I loved the novel when I read it many years ago and I still liked it when I read it now, One minute you're laughing and then next minute in shock and wanting to cry, Wish I could write about what differences I noticed from the first edition and this one but, unfortunately, I can't, All I can say is that I'm so glad Adam Cadre reached out so that I could read this
again, i def liked this book, but it had been suggested to me that this was potentially the best book written about high school ever, and those are big shoes to fill.
i think i was also misled since in the very beginning he explains that almost everyone he knows/loves will be dead in a month, so the whole time i was waiting for some sort of infectious disease to wipe out the population.
i was therefore surprised to learn that people were actually dead due to suicide and/or his brother and co, shooting up the school.
this book had some really weird interesting characters/elements which i did enjoy, but then some of them were just really weird, the nine year old brother peacing out to go live on his own that was sort of the straw the broke the camel's back in terms of weird family dynamics.
they were alreadyorphans of mixed races living basically alone, with one brother being a complete psycho, one sister being a naked hippy who seemed more like an aging lovechild than a barely pubescent tween, and a set of twins with very little in common.
overall i thought allen was pretty typical of a high school boy, but that just made it so frustrating that he couldn't see how into him September was :.
I also felt like he and the others who were aware of the "scratch girls/boys" seemed pretty blase about their classmates basically living out that final ass to ass scene in requiem for a dream, presumably every weekend.
This book is an emotional roller coaster, One minute you're laughing at the narrator, next minute your heart is pounding, next minute you can't sit still, next minute you're screaming and the next minute you're crying.
Then it starts again.
There are few books with the power that this one has, regarding school shootings it seems like such a hot topic now but this book was written years ago and was limited in print and is currently out of print it is very tricky to get your hands on but it is SO WORTH IT to read!!!
Honestly, one of the best books I've ever read.
Some of the best characters ever developed, and one of the most important story lines ever explored that has gotten almost no attention and it deserves a spotlight.
Fascinating narritive, disturbing characters. Thought provoking. Abandoned half way through. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I found Cadre's tone here really gratingeverything sounds like someone writing a book, no one sounds like a real person.
Bummer. So, postcollege, I found this book in the YA section of my local library, I read it and fell in love, My roommate then read it and she fell in love, I reread it, she reread it, etc, Somehow, I manage to forget the title and the author and in the subsequent ten years or so, I keep searching the internet for some clue that will lead me back to this book.
Then, lo and behold, in the dingy aisles of a large dollar store in Middlebury, VT this past Christmas, I find twenty hardback editions! I bought five Adam Cadre, if you are reading this, msg me and I'd be happy to send you a check as I imagine you are getting no royalties from that sale.
Anyway, I just read it for I think the third time,
This novel is the satire that me and my high schools would have written if our lives had been slightly more disaffected and suburban.
It is the literary complement to the amazing "Veronica Mars" too,
The basic plot: a wiseass, super intelligent kid has found a position for himself in the delicate ecosystem of high school.
It requires him to be a sort of a proud dork, an emissary between social groups and terminally sarcastic, He comes from a family that has been through a lot and he is attracted, unsurprisingly, to a girl down the street who he thinks represents utter normalcy.
Of course he is wrong and a lot happens to drive the book toward a tragic ending which is heavily foreshadowed from page one.
It's important to remember that this is a form of satire and while the plot points may sound cliched, two things really set it apart:the characters represent fully formed people.
There is a tendency to think of high schoolers as absent the same personality traits we observe in adults, Yes, kids are still developing etc, but some of them are as big of an asshole atas they will be atand Cadre captures that well.
The narrative voice. Devastatingly funny, insightful and clueless all at the same time,
I can not say enough about this book and yet I think this review falls somewhat flat, Trust me. Just read it. I have a few extra copies, This is not a chearleaders book despite the deceptive title, It is about a school shooting and one family that has their foot one step in reality and one step in the other.
I loved every page. I first heard of Adam Cadre through the Lyttle Lytton contest he runs, If that isn't also the case for you, it's an offshoot of the BulwerLytton contest where people come up with terrible opening lines for novels, but with an additional emphasis on brevity and plausibility.
I recommend checking it out Cadre and the entrants really have a knack for "intentional unintentional comedy", as it were, The reason this is all relevant is because the opening lines of Ready, Okay! are punchy and engaging, enough so to be featured in the Ready, Okay!'s description here, and exactly what you'd expect from someone who'd spent years examining what makes an opening line work or, rather, not work.
But I have to wonder if perhaps this focus on writing an "antiLytton" came at the expense of the rest of the novel.
I was told to expect the Big Tragedy to occur "in a few weeks", giving a sense of immediacy and uncertainty, and leaving me wondering how much of the novel will elapse beforehand and how much will be devoted to the fallout.
But then most of what follows is told in flashbacks with the occasional reminder of "don't worry I promise we're getting to the Big Tragedy soon", which quashed that tension and replaced it with the feeling of simply being strung along.
In general, the tone of Ready, Okay! felt a little off to me, The marriage of offbeat characters, witty lines, and horrible events reminded me of Catch, or the snippets I've read of Pynchon novels that I swear I'll finish one day, but this didn't quite synthesize properly to me for some reason.
I didn't find the cast likable or relatable enough to be invested in their fate on a literal level, but neither did I find them weird enough to invite the sort of tonal suspension of disbelief that I get from the above comparisons.
Certain details about the world, like the school's broken clock tower or the "Try PCP!" sign should be funny in isolation, but start to feel contrived when Allen snarks about them to the other characters, as though they were put in the world specifically for use as snark bait.
I'm being very critical about this for a threestar review, Part of this is that it's a lot easier for me to see things that don't work than to notice things that do I blame my engineering background.
Part of it is that I'm not good enough at critique or writing in general to translate my gut feelings into an eloquent, coherent thought, so I'm just spending a lot of words blindly grasping in a general direction.
And part of it is that it's really a,star review, in retrospect. The reason I round that up is because, when the rubber hit the road, the Big Tragedy did strike true, and left me with a feeling I couldn't accurately describe for a few days.
Plus I like Cadre's blog, .