Butter Blog Tour: guest post

I'm thrilled to have the Butter Blog Tour stopping by here today with a guest post from author Erin Jade Lange

A lonely obese boy everyone calls "Butter" is about to make history. He is going to eat himself to death-live on the Internet-and everyone is invited to watch. When he first makes the announcement online to his classmates, Butter expects pity, insults, and possibly sheer indifference. What he gets are morbid cheerleaders rallying around his deadly plan. Yet as their dark encouragement grows, it begins to feel a lot like popularity. And that feels good. But what happens when Butter reaches his suicide deadline? Can he live with the fallout if he doesn't go through with his plans? With a deft hand, E.J. Lange allows readers to identify with both the bullies and the bullied in this all-consuming look at one teen's battle with himself.

Purchase: Amazon / B&N / Book Depository

Since Butter is a coming of age story of sorts I thought it would be interesting to ask Erin what her top five favorite  coming of books are...

5 Favorite Coming of Age Books

by Erin Jade Lange

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton – This would be my number one pick for a coming of age tale, mainly because –more than any other book– the main character is so clearly a BOY in the beginning and so clearly becoming a MAN in the end. And S.E. Hinton captures this beautifully and believably in so few pages. The Outsiders has a fabulous coming-of-age lesson about friendships and enemies and how those lines sometimes blur, especially when the conflict becomes larger than the people involved.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume – What can I say about this classic coming of age story that hasn’t already been said? It is the perfect pick for a girl at that stage when her body is changing, but it’s also a fabulous example of how teenagers take the values they’ve grown up with and begin to really think about those values independently and become someone very individual from their parents. I identified with this book as a teen, because I also grew up with 2 parents with different religious beliefs and had to sort out for myself what I believed.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead – Time travel and other fantastical elements are only the backdrop for what is really a story about growing up. When You Reach Me deals with some powerful coming of age realities like the evolution of friendships and witnessing racism or cruelty for the first time.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer – This story provides a great example of how a terrible loss can make us grow up too fast.

The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney – Coming of age lessons aren’t easily learned. That is certainly the case for the main character in The Mockingbirds, who transitions from victim to judge and learns along the way that justice isn’t always black or white but often shades of gray.

Erin Jade Lange: Site / Goodreads /  Twitter / Facebook

Erin writes facts by day and fiction by night. As a journalist, she is inspired by current events and real-world issues and uses her writing to explore how those issues impact teenagers.

She is an only child, which means she spent a lot of time entertaining herself as a kid. This required her to rely heavily on her own imagination, which is probably why she became a writer.

Erin grew up in the cornfields of northern Illinois, along the Mississippi River in one of the few places it flows east to west. She now lives in the sunshine of Arizona and will forever be torn between her love of rivers and her love of the desert.

BUTTER is her first novel.