Bruiser

If you’re empathetic, you will connect with this book and the pain that people expect and take out of you. If you’re not, this is Empathy Class 101. Brewster is called Bruiser because he looks like someone who could beat the living daylights out of you, when in reality he’s the one in an unbelievable amount of pain. Brontë is the first person outside his immediate family to really love Brew for who he is. But the more he loves back, the more Brew is racked with pain. Even those who come to love and deeply care for him also become addicted to him and can’t let him go, jeopardizing so many lives. This is YA, but it is profound with so many levels of meaning. Strongly recommended.

Rating for the first half: 4-5 stars.
Rating after chapter 45: 2.5-3 stars.
Please read full review for why.

I want to take a moment to talk about this book, really get into all those nooks and cracks. This book at its core is about abuse. Well there is a fantastical element to Brewster this is just an aspect of the book not the focus in a lot of ways. Bruiser is about a kid and his brother being held emotionally and physically hostage by an abusive parent. Well the fantastical nature of his power does come into play it is used as a literal representation of what this kind of abuse feels like. There is so much about how the Uncle beats Brewster's brother in order to hurt him, that is a abusers go to in the handbook. The fact that Brewster show more takes the abuse physically upon his body is just a metaphor. In a way all of this book is a metaphor.

I ended up swept up in the fact that this was portraying domestic and child abuse in a way that children could understand, when the uncle hurts Brewster's brother or himself it hurts his abuse victim. This is a tactic I know very well, I survived this kind of abuse. We are often I wasn't the one who was harmed physically but my abuser hurt themselves in order to harm me. Or they would harm a pet, or someone close to me. Seeing it done in this book with the magical element added it feels awful. Awful. This is real abuse in a child's book. And it is portrayed exactly how it is. There is no moment where Brewster feels safe, his little brother feel safe in ways because his big brother is taking all the abuse for him.

I find Tennyson to be amazing, as a character he is a child, and he is written as a child. But he is written as a bratty little brother but also a brother who cares about his sibling. Tennyson never loses sight of his family, even when he has basic feelings or anger or greed he knows that he loves his family. And I really appreciate that he didn't lose that along the way.

The parallels between the families that are shown is amazing, Brewster has an uncle and no family and it's all bad, while Tennyson and Bronte both have a family that is falling apart but they still stay strong and it's still better than what Brewster has. Both have their own problems but in the face of each other's it feels small and not as bad. And yet it is bad for Brewster. It's bad for Cody.

This is honestly a 4 star book until chapter 46 onward.

Now for the flaws.

POV issues.
I don't really care about Bronte for a while, the book opens with this hard steering power that makes it feel like it's going to be a book all about Tennyson. It's only later than it switches to bronte's perspective and you realize oh this is a book about both of them. It doesn't even feel like initially we're going to see it from anyone's perspective besides Tennyson, that's how driven his chapters feel. Brewster and Bronte both have the problem of their chapters feel lackluster and not as strong, I have no issue with Brewster's chapters being in prose. But I do have problems with the strength of them. As soon as it switches back to Tennyson it is all him all the time and it is obvious that this book was written for his perspective only.

The parents.
I feel like the parents sort of just exist and needed more time. They take a forefront in the book near the end of it, but with just a couple of chapters left it feels like they're not there enough. In fact they're not there for most of 45 chapters, they're just perceived through the other kids. But we have some interesting tidbits on them and it would be nice if it was elaborated upon more. I think Bruiser is a great book, and we need more books to address abuse like this.

The auto defense behavior of the parents.
It is a spoiler warning but the parents of Tennyson and Bronte adopt Brewster for a short while. During this it goes from Brewster is a person to Brewster is a threat to their children namely the girl he's dating, Bronte. This completely changes the prior chapters given the family knew they were dating and had no issue with them being alone all the time. Bronte often went on walks with him, on dates with him, anything that could have happened at home would have happened while out. This pushes that stereotypical overprotective parents being weird for no reason other than "oh my gosh there's a boy and a girl living in the same house". It is horribly annoying to see that in this book. It is such outdated behavior I do not know why it is here.

The pacing.
Personally in many ways I think this book should have ended at chapter 44 or 45, I felt like those were the chapters where it was wrapping up and it didn't need to have that tail end added. If it had ended in the early 40s it might have stayed 5 star, continuing hurt it more than it helped.

As it pushes on we enter the territory of if you wanted enough you can hold on to it, which a lot of people complained about in the comments here but I understand, their uncle was angry so much that he held on to his anger. This sounds like a plot hole that he was still angry when Brewster should have took everything. But if you want to be angry hard enough you would hold on to it much like Cody holds on to his fear. But by introducing this concept to us it throws off the whole plot by just a little bit. Now the plot is a bit of a crooked photo. And I can never not see that it is crooked.

The character assassination post chapter 45.
For some reason both Tennyson and Bronte forget completely and utterly about Brewster's power. Like they continue on with introducing them to multiple people having him be around a lot of friends and all sorts of things. Things that are very dangerous knowing his power. But on top of that everyone in the household including those who know keep having their emotions taken away and not understanding why. Tennyson and Bronte both are in the know of what's going on, but it is utterly vanished from their mind this power that he has. So they start to be really weird and act out of character or extremely dangerously.

Brewster isn't even a focus after these chapters. He's existing in the background, sponging up everyone's problems. Tennyson gets absolutely character assassinated. He goes from a rational person who understands Brewster's power and cares about him to using him for the very last few chapters. No real reason besides he decides that he's going to use him to make everything bad feeling go away.

And that all leads into what made this a two-star book near the end. Brewsters symbolism and existence after being saved is he exists to take everyone's pain. A victim exists to absorb all of the pain around him until it kills him. That is absolutely disgusting. There is so much of this book that was saying that Brewster was more than his powers Brewster was more than all of the abuse Brewster was so much more. And we end basically with he exists to take the pain until he dies, the very thing that he escaped his uncle to reclaim his life over is what happens to him. This isn't a happy ending, and it happens mostly because Tennyson and Bronte decide to be utterly selfish. An extremely preventable fate.

And for what, what was the point of getting him out of an awful situation where he was going to die and putting him into another situation where he was going to die? The ending implies that he is not dead, but there's no proof that he isn't brain damaged or worse. This portrayal of an abuse victim existing only to take other people's pain and abuse really drove this book into a bad place. show less

This was a masterpiece- but what else have I come to expect from Neal Shusterman? He's cool like that.

This book comes from a completely implausible premise- a boy named Brewster who automatically takes on the wounds of everyone he loves. His brother Cody kicks a rock? It's Brew's toe that hurts. Neal Shusterman has a knack for writing the supernatural believably. His character's don't go into long explanations of how they're "this way". Like in The Schwa Was Here, the character doesn't know why he has this power, and he doesn't like it, but he's learned to live with it.

This book was also relatable. The unnatural was explored through well-understood circumstances of high school life, sports injuries, teenage friendships, romances, and show more rivalries, abuse, and parents' divorce.

I love how Shusterman described the soft terror of not feeling upset.
I love how little-boyish Cody was. It's hard as a grown person to put yourself back in your third-grade brain and think how you would have responded at that age. Shusterman has it down.
I love how Brewster and Brontë were friends. Not Just Friends, but their relationship wasn't all making out and cuddling and stuff. It was watching out for each other and trying to help each other- even if sometimes their help wasn't as good as they thought it would be. They are possibly the normalest literary teen couple I've read (at least since I was a teenager myself).
I love Tennyson's friendships with his sister and her boyfriend. He was a good friend. He was also really selfish, which is human nature.
I LOVE the scene of the uncle's stroke. Has Neal Shusterman had a stroke and remembers what is was like? Whoa.
I love how the first chapter made me laugh out loud multiple times ("Rest her soul") and then the book got so heart-wrenching and serious. This is how you write. I took the bait from the first 2 pages and then I was reeled into this world of heartache, or the emptiness of its absence.
I love the whole vegetarianism thing.
I love the format of a lot a Brew's poetry. There's the one that works itself backwards at the end, it's really cool. Sometimes the verse form seemed force but other times it was so awesomely effective.

I LOVE THIS BOOK AND I LOVE NEAL SHUSTERMAN ok i'm done show less

I loved this book's exploration of the idea of compassion. Imagine if another person could take on our suffering--physical and emotional. Would we become "addicted" to that person in order to be freed of our own pain? That's what Shusterman explores in this thought-provoking young adult book. A young man who appears to be an outcast has remarkable powers of compassion which cause him to suffer the pain of others. Well worth reading. I don't think I've encountered another book like it. I love the direction Shusterman has been taking with some of his more recent books--this one and Unwind.

"You think you want to know the secrets of the universe. You think you want to see the way things all fit together. You believe in your heart of hearts that enlightenment will save the world and set you free.
Maybe it will.
But the path to enlightenment is rarely a pleasant one."

I had this one as an audio book. Wonderful! The readers were excellent. Bronte's narrator was fabulous! I couldn't wait every morning when I got to pop this in and pick the story back up.

Of course, the story was also amazing. Brewster, Bronte, Tennyson, even the parents in the story were so well done. The conversations had me laughing out loud just as much as when my heart broke over what they were experiencing.

Like so many Shusterman books, this one was first class. We have Brewster (Bruiser) who is anything but a bruiser. He has the supernatural ability to take pain from those he loves. You experience his pain with him as he learns to love others and suffers for it. It is absolutely heartbreaking. My daughter recommended this book to me more than a year ago. I should have listened to her.

Hulking outsider Brewster Rawlins, a.k.a. Bruiser, is voted Most Likely to Receive the Death Penalty. Brontë, who gravitates toward hard-luck cases, is intrigued by him. Her brother, Tennyson, doesn’t want her dating outside her own species.

Neal Shusterman’s novel Bruiser examines both the debilitating and healing effects of being human.

Bruiser literally takes away people’s pain: his brother Cody falls from the roof, and Brewster ends up with a broken arm. His uncle suffers a stroke, and Brewster experiences the embolism. Brontë and Tennyson struggled through their parents’ fracturing relationship, and Brewster siphons away their grief.

Bruiser’s empathic ability is foremost a curse. He cannot allow himself to feel close to show more anyone or soon he will be draining off every cut, bruise and broken heart. And yet it’s almost a superpower that he wields to keep his younger brother safe from their uncle’s drunken rages.

The problem is that he cannot shut it off. He has learned to be wary for a good reason. But as Brontë draws him from his shell, he experiences the exhilaration of new friendship, which comes at a cost. In Shusterman’s world, pain is manifest everywhere, and that is part of living. We want to hide from our individual pain, but it seems that only by embracing it are we fully human.

Shusterman employs four unique narrative voices to tell the story: Tennyson’s sense of immediacy, Brontë’s reflections, Cody’s stream-of-conscience, and Brewster’s free verse. He creates complex characters who all must learn how to be present to life, with all its joys and challenges. No one is safe from harm, yet how we deal with it, how we make it part of who we are, is an important means of surviving and growing.

I had only just started this book when the library loan expired. In a rare moment of reading-laziness I didn’t renew it. Yet I kept thinking about the characters and wondering what was happening with them. I’m glad I went back to find out. show less