The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party

For this week, our Young Adult Literature class theme is Printz Award winners and Honor books, a category specifically reserved for young adult novels of high value and literary quality. How to define value and literary quality is a whole argument in itself, but hopefully one day I’ll get to that in this blog. I personally chose to read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (review coming next), while our entire class read The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson. Both books are historical fiction with very different takes on the genre.

Octavian Nothing is the story of the son of an African princess being raised by a secret society in pre-revolutionary Boston. The Novanglian College of Lucidity is working on an experiment, giving Octavian the same premier education as European princes, to determine if race has any effect on intelligence. Among their intellectual experiments, the society also works with medicine, trying a primitive inoculation against smallpox that goes awry. As the revolution begins, the society trips up, and Octavian goes on the run. Here Octavian’s voice ends for a long while, and the rest of the novel is a multigenre experience recounting his recapture and slavery, experiencing a sort of physical imprisonment where his intellectual imprisonment ended.

This book would be a hard sell to high school students. The idea of historical fiction can make history lessons more interesting, and can work really well for interdisciplinary teaching. This book, however, I don’t think is the one to do it. The entire first half of the story details Octavian’s education and experience with the College of Lucidity through his point of view, and this is a slow section. The language, for one thing, attempts to recreate early American highly educated ways of speaking, but it makes the first half of the book very difficult to get through. There isn’t much action to be seen in this section either, compounding how slowly it moves. I appreciate the themes of freedom that the book raises, making intellectual imprisonment the true suppression of freedom. Young adults could use this sort of illustration of the power of rebellion to funnel their incredible energy. Still, acknowledging that high school students can be difficult to motivate, a novel that was tough for a college student to plow through is a tough expectation for younger students.

Suggested grade level: 10th-11th grade
Appropriateness: racial issues, difficulty level