The Freak Observer by Blythe Woolston
pages: 208
released: August 2010
publisher: Carolrhoda Books
cover love: ♥♥♥
The Freak Observer is rich in family drama, theoretical physics, and an unusual, tough young woman Loa Lindgren. When her younger sister dies, 16-year-old Loa’s clockwork galaxy collapses. As she spins off on her own, Loa’s mind ambushes her with vivid nightmares and sadistic flashbacks a textbook case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. But there are no textbook fixes for Loa’s short-circuiting brain. If she keeps her eyes open and her neurons busy, there’s less chance for her imagination to brew up nightmares and panic attacks. Maybe then she’ll be able to pry her world from the clutches of death. The Freak Observer is a startling debut about death, life, astrophysics, and finding beauty in chaos. (from Goodreads)
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 8/27/2011 ON BOOKSLIKESTARS.NET
Review:
Wikipedia’s description of the Freak Observer:
Also known as Boltzmann Brain, named after Ludwig Boltzmann, the physicist. A hypothesized self-aware entity which arises due to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos…(say what???)
Loa Lindgren’s description of the Freak Observer:
“Everything has been simplified to a purple cereal bowl sitting on the table of time and space.
Inside the big bowl are other, tinier bowls. Each little bowl is a universe.
In a little blue bowl, there is a tiny Earth. The little blue cereal bowl is our visible universe.
There are many little naked brains floating in the big purple bowl.
They look like little tan walnuts, the brains do.
Some are curled like chicks inside the shells of little bowls, but others are just “out there” in nothing.
Those little brains floating all alone are the Freak Observers. Their job is to observe what we do not.”
My description of The Freak Observer:
An extraordinary, award-winning contemporary young adult novel written by Blythe Woolston.
(My review will not do this book justice, but here goes):
I loved this book so much and it’s one of the best I’ve ever read. Every part of it. Every line. Every word. As I turned page after page, my reading became much slower. Because I didn’t want it to end. Okay, okay, you get the idea. Why did I love this book so much? Loa. Loa Lindgren. And I thank the author for creating her. I was absolutely absorbed with her and her perspective on the pain and tragedy in her life. She reminded me of one of my all-time favorite characters, Melinda Sordino. Some would say this book could be a little weird but I ‘m weird so it was perfect for me.
Loa suffers from PSTD. Post-traumatic stress disorder, brought on by the death of her sister, Asta and her best friend, Esther. She has terrible nightmares and hallucinations of body parts and a boogie man called The Bony Guy. She doesn’t do so well in therapy so she makes up her own routine to keep these horrible things from happening all the time. She doesn’t sleep, she tries to avoid certain smells and places that are triggers. She hardly speaks to anyone and is withdrawn. She’s just kind of there, taking up space and matter, turning into a freak observer.
It’s perplexing how Loa compares, initiates, and conceives everything based on physics, science and math. There is a logical explanation for everything and she hardly reacts or feels with emotional comprehension. She tries to find reasoning behind Esther mysteriously running straight in front of an oncoming truck. If she meant to or was it an accident? And she describes her home life as an orrery, a science model used to show how the solar system rotates. She places Asta in the middle, representing the sun and her family orbiting around her, as the planets. She is their light and they function in accordance to her existence. Asta suffered from Rett’s syndrome and when she passed away, her family fell out of sync with their designated areas and drifted off into their own private emptiness.
If you love Laurie Halse Anderson (which I do), then you probably should check this one out. I only borrowed it from the library because it looked like a short, fast read but I ended up seriously mesmerized by this tiny novel. It can be depressing at times and there isn’t a lot of closure at the end but it’s more about the character’s personality, voice and development during serious and traumatic issues than structured plot points.
Favorite Lines
“The important thing to remember is that this is normal–for crazy people. I even know its name: intrusive imagery. Esther’s bloody heart isn’t now, nor has it ever been, in the laundry basket. It’s just a glitch in my brain. My programming is missing a breakpoint, and I’m stuck in an infinite loop. It’s a processing problem, a stray spark lost in the dirty Jell-O inside my head.”
“My dad used to tell me lots of stories about when he was a kid. Now he doesn’t. He hardly talks at all. We walk past each other like ghosts. Sometimes I wonder if I died when Asta died, but I didn’t notice.”
“It is sort of like reading, once you learn to read, you can’t look at a word and not read it. Even if you leave out letters, your brain will fill in the places and make a word and make it make sense. The constellations are like words I know how to read. I can’t ‘not see’ them.”
5
