The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party

By M.T. Anderson (Candlewick, 2006).


I've never read a book with such a distinctly strange atmosphere, compounded of Gothic horror, Enlightenment idealism, slave memoir, and YA coming-of-age novel. Octavian and his mother are slaves in 18th-century America, and subjects of an ongoing experiment by a group of natural philosophers calling themselves the Novanglian College of Lucidity. The College is studying the effects of European education and culture on Africans. Octavian narrates most of the novel, sounding very convincingly like a well-educated man of his time.

The effects of the Novanglians' pseudoscientific experiment are bizarre and cruel. (Be warned: I almost stopped reading this book after a few chapters because I found the early descriptions of nasty experiments on cats and dogs so upsetting.) Octavian learns Latin, Greek, the violin; he also must weigh his faeces daily on a golden plate. That grotesque yoking of the crude and the refined is an image in little of the kind of mind that gets to be in charge of Octavian and his mother.

When the revolutionary war starts to break out--at the same time Octavian undergoes terrible loss and betrayal following the pox party--he escapes. Octavian then faces another set of cruel ironies: fighting on behalf of Liberty when he has none; fighting for Property when he is some. The almost unrelenting tone of suppressed, enraged horror gets some relief as the narrative turns to letters home from a rebel private who befriends Octavian, and who is as open and talkative as Octavian is closed in and silent. Other forms of narrative include advertisements, scientific reports, and passages crossed out in ink.

Brilliant, surprising, imaginative, brave enough to challenge YA readers with big words and big ideas, this is the most interesting novel for young readers—for any readers—I've come across in a long time.