The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation - M.T. Anderson

OK, This book won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature AND a Printz Honor, and to be honest, I really don't get why. I mean, it was sort of eerie and interesting, but I didn't really enjoy it. And if you look back at the rest of my posts, you'll see that doesn't happen that often. The language and syntax in this book are really quite unusual and bizarre, and it took me at least 50 pages to get into the swing of it. And even then I didn't necessarily like it. Unless you're a VERY strong reader with a really good vocabulary, I think this book would turn you off immediately for that reason alone. This book is set during revolutionary times and I also think that you need quite a bit of background knowledge about that time period for this book to make sense because there are a lot of events which require inference. We have this book in our library, but it's not going to be one I recommend to very many readers, award winner or not. I think older high schoolers would enjoy it more.