I stumbled across this book looking for The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books on Overdrive because the cover reminded me so much of them — the jeans with a purple background. Then I Googled it and saw it had a really high rating on Goodreads, so I thought I would give it a shot.
This is the story of an overweight teenager and her struggles with her really, REALLY shitty family. As far as body positivity novels go about overweight teens, it falls somewhere between Dumplin’ which I loved, and Butter, which horrified me. The biggest issue in this book is that these girl’s parents are majorly messed up. They withhold affection unless she’s losing weight, her father makes weird sexual comments about thin women he sees on TV, and they put immense amounts of pressure on her. It’s not until she begins acting out and standing up for herself that anything really changes positively for her. Unfortunately, the catalyst for this is when her perfect older brother date rapes a girl at school and get sent home. It’s a heavy book with a lot of adult themes but it’s written for a young adult audience which I think is great.
Hopefully the parents get a comeuppance?
They sort of kind of begin to understand. Definitely not satisfying.