Reviews with content warning for Drug abuse - Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos

This book is definitely not for everyone but it was FOR ME. One of the handful of books I've read that's compared to The Secret History that lived up to that claim for me. I also really loved the playlists and think that overall social media was incorporated in a way that felt really accurate and also didn't date the story. The prose will probably wear on some people and I do think this book could stand to be a little shorter, but I think the teen characters feel really authentically drawn and engaging, to the point where it's emotionally hard to read at points. But overall, I know I'll keep thinking about this book and I was really impressed.

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dizzzybrook's review

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challenging dark emotional informative mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

Since no one else wants to say it, I guess I will. This book is 544 pages of excessive and graphic depictions of minors jerking off and having sex. Foster Dade could have been an incredible opportunity for Jenkins to comment on toxic masculinity, how porn influences men's empathy towards women, and how such topics influence our relationships and mental health throughout youth, but what we get is rather another "boys will be boys" driven book that essentially amounts to nothing and seeks validation through nostalgia.

Absolutely NOTHING about this book is reminiscent of The Secret History. No aspect of Foster Dade falls into the category of dark academia. With that being said, for a book that's plot is supposed to involve the main character selling drugs, this book really isn't even about drugs either. I feel that so much of this book's defense is that it is trying to authentically portray the lingo, the values, and the social climate of those back in 2008-2010, but if you are going to write a book consumed with so much misogyny, shouldn't there be a point?

There are no likeable characters in this book. Every female character exists with the sole purpose of being traumatized by another male character, usually in a sexual way. Every female character is described by their hotness, their breast size, how good they would be in bed. There is nothing remarkable or interesting about Foster other than the fact that the narrator does their best to convince us we should care - only for the reader to realize in the end that there simply truly never was anything to care about in the first place.

The structure of this book is absolutely punishable. The constant jumping between timelines made this book nearly impossible to listen to at times. I feel like this structure made Foster's story even more cold and distant and unapproachable than it already was. This book could have benefited dramatically from being edited and cut down several hundred pages.

The only reason I'm rating 2/5 stars is because I'm adding an extra star for MYSELF for sitting through 22 hours of the audiobook.

Major TW's for graphic sex scenes depicting minors, graphic and excessive scenes involving masturbation, sexual assault, drug use, suicide, misogyny, homophobia, bullying.

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lizzybennets's review

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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catlady94's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

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booksbeyondthebinary's review

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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fearfulshrimp's review

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challenging dark mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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juleffervescent's review

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challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

5.0

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katherineflitsch_'s review

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

On the surface, it’s about kids at boarding school and the rise of an adderall ring and how all of that plus teen hormones and teen cruelty in the landscape of BlackBerries and Facebook all comes to a devastating tragic end. But really, it’s about youth and wanting to fit into the ecosystem you find yourself in and wanting to be happy in general and finding it frustratingly difficult to do either let alone both of those things. And it is beautifully and so honestly written. I loved, obsessed.

This book broke me. I was here for it. So I guess you could say I suffered and I was happy about it. (The occasional Harry Potter references smattered across these pages as should be in a story set in 2008-2010 certainly helped aid that along like little winks and nods.) Objectively this book is written with talent and expertise and verve and pain and honesty and a tremendous amount of feeling. Subjectively I think it hit in many ways, and personally at moments I was not okay, in the way (perhaps massochistically as a reader) you want a book to affect you.

Part of what is so expert about this story’s craft is that it perfectly achieves that narrative goal of the things that happen should be unexpected and yet make perfect sense. And true to that aim, the way these characters act just always fits perfectly. Everything that occurs feels inevitable, and yet I wouldn’t call any of it predictable, not at least in a lame or disappointing or certainly not cheap sense.

The verbosity particularly towards the end is frustrating. And I want to say that it’s a conscious expertness on the part of controlling pace to stretch out the climax, but the equal truth is that it’s simply frustrating to experience, like when someone is telling you a story and you know the good part is a sentence away, but they keep delaying that reveal, talking instead about inconsequential things like visual descriptions of the scene or the historical background etc. Just give it to us!!! You can tell us those asides in the denouement. Stop dancing around the neat unfolding of this story. But I obviously must commend that more than I criticize it, because clearly it made me feel things as any good piece of writing should. Well done, Nash. Point taken.

I love the way even Annabeth, whom foster once described and always seemed to view as perfect beyond flaws, is complicated through the end. And I love the painful frustrating reality of how everything shakes down and how those with particular privilege weather it versus others without who don’t (and how even those of lesser privilege who get caught in the torrent find themselves, for the privilege they do have, washing up on comfortable islands all the same). I love a book like this that talks about privilege in ways that are not high and mighty, instead of those obvious shallow and predictable attempts that are annoyingly self-aware and conspicuously self-satisfied.

Upon finishing:

I nearly started crying reading the last paragraph of the closing author’s note aloud to my roommate hahaha

This book should have a trigger warning about themes of suicide (since it’s not explicitly written into the cover copy), but aside from that dare I say it is perfect.

It is sweeping in feeling like tomorrowx3 but a little bit grungier. It is like a grown-up perks of being a wallflower that nods to a separate peace. It is like mean girls expanded across genders and without the comedic tone that in the movie softens the torturous cruelty of it all.

And it hit me particularly hard personally because of how much I related to foster, and how frighteningly similar our patterns of thinking can often be (and particularly were, for me, in high school and even early college, and sometimes now when thoughts spiral still). And it’s haunting to watch his story play out and realize how closely mine might have resembled it all had just a few (not insignificant, to be fair, but passive on our part) details of initializing circumstance been different.

This book feels real, and it feels painfully beautiful. I’ll close this with a quote (just one of many palpably beautiful lines; every sentence is gorgeously constructed) a quote from the final lines of the book, and the final lines of Foster’s famous final paper: “There are moments like this when I allow myself to see the beauty I’d always foreclosed to myself. Part of me thinks that my ability to see it when I do is inseparable from the pain that I feel, and when I think that, the pain suddenly isn’t so bad. The sun is going to come up in the morning. I really don’t like myself a lot of the time, but sometimes I look back over the words I’ve written on my blog and elsewhere and I kind of smile at my own bullshit. I’ll grow up, and then I will come back to them again. It’s fine. I will be fine. There is a spastic firelight in everything. The trick is knowing how to find it.”

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