Butts isn’t what I expected, but (pun unintended) I don’t know what I expected, to be quite honest. I remember wondering how anybody could sustain talk about butts for the length of a full book, which is why I had avoided buying/reading this one, in spite of the hype. When it came time for my birthday, though, and I had the opportunity to do the book store challenge, where you get a set amount of time to run rampant in a book store and the other person buys however many books you can grab, this was one of the ones that I decided to take a chance on. I’m glad I did, too. Simultaneously, however, I’m also kinda not pleased with the fact that I know what I do now, having read this.
Radke, in her very tangential take on the “backstory” of butts goes into some very dark corners of history that had me mouth agape and unable to process what it was that I was reading. When fart clubs where people drank different drinks to see what smells and sounds their resulting farts would produce becomes a footnote on the list of oddities, I think you get a sense of what I’m talking about. There were, honest-to-god, people who thought Miley Cyrus was the inventor of twerking. And, again, that is one of the tamer parts of this book.
If you go into this expecting a light-hearted read where you’ll just get a good chuckle out of stuff relating to people’s butts, you’ll be sorely mistaken. That’s what I sort of expected from it, and while there were some laughs to be had, it was mostly enlightening in a quite concerning way. Radke loses the thread here and there, particularly towards the end, but there’s enough meat on the bones of all those wild tangents of hers to keep you going for the length of this admittedly short book, and I’d say it’s well worth a read. Is it worth all the hype surrounding it? Not quite. Don’t hold that against it, though.