Odd Octavian Observations

Reading Response #7

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traiter To The Nation: Volume I: The Pox Party was a very interesting book. It personified a different type of character than we normally read about. The diction and writing style was intriguing – it reads like a classic out of the Cannon. All that being said, I don’t know if I would use this book in my classroom. It just seems too advanced for a middle grade class as a whole, but I would recommend it to individuals perhaps.

The book starts with Octavian and his mother Cassiopeia, an African princess, living in a house full of philosophers and scientists in colonial Boston. They were doing lots of different experiments and research on pretty much everything! This first part has a couple of different sections that you could use for read alouds in a science classroom – about deeper thinking and reasoning. Like when Mr. Gitney, also known as 03-01, always asks Octavian what he is thinking and why.

Eventually, Cassiopeia angers the beneficiary of the Society and they are kicked out and have to go be a part of another experiment with Richard Sharpe.  In this situation, a group of businessmen, who own slaves, are appearing to rig the experiment with Octavian in order to prove that Africans are inferior.  This is a good section to discuss with the class about how this is not true, how no race is superior – you could do this in a social studies classroom and talk about African Americans in the Civil Rights movement or Hitler trying to make the perfect Aryan race.

After a nasty Pox Party (when I almost vomited!), Cassiopeia dies and is dissected in the house. This infuriates Octavian, so he runs away and joins the Colonial Army. Octavian's military adventures are narrated mostly in epistolary form by Private Evidence Goring, a private in Octavian's regiment who befriends him, in letters to his sister Fruition. This could be a good part to use in an English classroom – to discuss how that type of writing works and how it is and isn’t effective. There are several other source texts that you could use to tie all of this together.

All in all, this book has several useful points that I could use in the classroom, but as a whole, I would not teach this book. It is just too complex for the average middle school student – and even for me, at times. And I think some of the qualities I liked about this book, I could find in a more age appropriate text. Much like pieces in the Cannon, I am glad to say I read this book, but did not fully enjoy it as just a regular reader.

I would just like to finish with this quote by Dr. 09-01: “The pupil is black, and as large as a world” (p. 61). This is a very profound statement – which is very fitting for such a profound book (which it certainly was!).

Anderson, M. T. (2006). The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traiter To The Nation: Volume I: The Pox Party. Cambridge, Mass.: Candlewick Press.