Thursday, April 12, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Art of Starving by Sam J Miller



The Art of Starving is yet another YA genre novel that has been nominated for a bunch of awards (for both the Norton Award and for the new "Not a Hugo" Award for Best YA Novel).   The book falls into the Fantasy sub-genre of books where it's not clear how real the fantasy elements actually are - for the most part - and I don't mean this in a negative way - this is a YA coming of age story of a semi-closeted gay high school boy with an eating disorder.  The Fantasy elements come from the powers the protagonist - Matt - seems to obtain when starving himself (hence the title), but it's not even clear to the protagonist (who tells the entire story in First Person) whether or not those powers are real.

In this way, and a few others, the book reminded me quite a bit of Paul Cornell's novel "Chalk," which also featured a protagonist seeking revenge and possibly the invocation of magical powers in an otherwise normal reality.  Both books could be quite brutal to read at times, as their protagonists suffer.  Still, the books are very different, but at the same time, some of their differences I think are worth examining as a good way to show why I didn't quite love The Art of Starving - both books eventually wind up with major climaxes involving their fantasy elements, but The Art of Starving's feels less earned and then fizzles out, unlike that of Chalk.  Whereas Chalk seems to know where it was going in the end, The Art of Starving seemed to me like like it couldn't figure out how it wanted to get from it's critical plot points to its ending, and that made this coming of age story go from potentially great to something lesser.   I can see why this book was nominated for Awards, but as a result I can't quite endorse it winning those awards (though I expect it to do so).

Note: I read this as an audiobook, so if I get some names and spellings wrong, that's why.  The audiobook reader is particularly good, so it's definitely worth getting in that format.

More after the Jump:


---------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------
Matt's life sucks.  A Junior in High School in Hudson, New York, Matt is a semi-closeted (the whole school knows he's gay and he doesn't deny it, but he hasn't told his mother) gay kid without friends who is the subject of bullies - namely three members of the school's soccer team - Ott, the physical bully, Bastion, the verbal bully, and Tariq, the beautiful kid who simply watches the other two without saying anything.  Matt also thinks his body looks disgusting and is embarrassed when he eats.

To make it worse, Matt's mom is a single mom who works in a job at the local slaughterhouse, which is in danger of being shutdown, and his sister Maya ran away from home and has been gone for the past year.  Maya was the only person Matt really had to talk to, the only one he'd actively come out with, the only person he could bear out his heart to.  And now she's gone, and barely replies to his many many emails.  Matt's mom refuses to believe that Maya ran because of something awful that's happened, but Matt knows otherwise.....and Matt knows that on the night before she ran away, Maya left the house in Tariq's car.  And since Maya ran away.....Tariq can't seem to be able to look at Matt. Now Matt wants revenge for whatever horrible act Tariq did to drive Maya away.

But as Matt starts to starve himself rather than eat, he thinks he's developing superpowers - he can hear things from far away, smell things on people, even read minds and somehow control reality.  And so Matt begins to starve himself even further, because without these skills, how will he ever find the truth and get justice for Maya?  But what Matt finds out with his powers may be something he couldn't possibly have imagined: the joy of love.  But when those very powers, and Matt's need for revenge, threaten that love, can Matt really find it in himself to eat....or will he starve himself to death?
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The Art of Starving is told as if it's a journal or guide written by Matt in first person.  Each chapter is preceded by a Rule (often a witty take on something that supposedly sounds profound) by Matt, followed by the Day # in the story and that day's calorie count (unless a chapter is mid-day, which happens a bunch).  These calorie counts are often painful for the reader - hearing Matt suddenly eating sub 500 calories in a day could not help but make me wince.  Because Matt's a pretty strong voice who I cared about pretty quickly.

Matt's messed up.  As he puts it himself in the first chapter - a school therapist diagnosed him as having suicidal ideation (though he stole the report from the mail so his mom didn't see it) and he quite clearly is anorexic though he refuses to say the word.  His mother is incredibly stressed (and a former alcoholic) and his sole emotional support, his sister, has run away without a word.  And he's convinced himself something horrible has happened to her and it is up to him to take revenge, even without any real reason to believe any of that other than his own messed up thinking.  And when he seems to gain superpowers from not eating, it only makes things worse.

But Matt's voice is strong and I really felt for him.  So when he finds love in the process of his attempt at obtaining revenge, it's incredibly painful to watch his problems mess up his chances at easy happiness.  I - and I suspect most readers - will see the twist coming in this area a mile away, but it makes sense that Matt wouldn't realize the truth until quite a bit later.  And I wanted him to find happiness really bad, that his screw ups made it hard for me to keep listening more than about an hour at a time.

This last paragraph is what makes this a very different book than the book I mentioned before the jump, Paul Cornell's Chalk, in that The Art of Starving is largely a book about love, even if it's not an actual love story.  Where the similarities come is in the climax, which without spoiling, results in all of the seeming supernatural events coming to a head.  But where Chalk's climax is built up to all book and resolves in a way that is well developed, The Art of Starving's climax has less buildup and essentially fizzles out.  I'm not really sure how it could have been resolved in a more satisfactory way, and I get the feeling the author didn't either - except he knew what he wanted the ending to be, even if he didn't know how to get there.  It's a relatively nice ending, as much as you could expect from this type of book, but it just seems very abrupt.

The end result is a book that hit my heart very strongly at times, but left me kind of let down near the end.  So I can see why it was nominated for awards, but it wouldn't be my pick of either the Nebula/Norton or (Not-a-)Hugo Award Nominees.  Worth a read though.
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