In the end, it’s more liberating than oppressive, with bits of humor and a jubilant pageant takeover by beauty rebels to...
In a small Texas town, a confident fat girl confronts new challenges to her self-esteem.
At age 16, Willowdean—her mother calls her Dumplin’—has a good sense of herself. She’s uninterested in Mom’s raison d’être, the Clover City Miss Teen Blue Bonnet Pageant, which annually takes over the town and Will’s own house. Mom won once and now runs the pageant, dieting to fit her old dress and pressuring Will to diet too. Will doesn’t. She mourns her beloved aunt Lucy, a second parent to her who died six months ago, and simmers with pleasure over a new, hot, sort-of-boyfriend. However, his touch makes Will panic with newfound insecurity. She loses him, loses her old best friend, gains new social-outsider buddies (a familiar trope)—and finds triumph somewhere amid Dolly Parton, drag queens, breaking pageant rules, and repairing relationships. The text refreshingly asserts that thinness is no requirement for doing and deserving good things, that weight loss isn’t a cure-all, and that dieting doesn’t work anyway. The plot arc, amazingly, avoids the all-too-common pitfall of having its fat protagonist lose weight. Unfortunately, Murphy loses her step and undermines her main point in the mournful, cringeworthy details of Lucy’s death and life, which are blamed on extreme fatness rather than unfairness.
In the end, it’s more liberating than oppressive, with bits of humor and a jubilant pageant takeover by beauty rebels to crown this unusual book about a fat character. (Fiction. 13-16)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-232718-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
The comedy and drama are both mild, but the two eminently likable teens at the center of it look capable of keeping heads...
Almost despite himself, 16-year-old Stan emerges with flying colors from a week of sweet confusion, domestic turmoil and momentous tests of character.
Basketball tryouts loom. Stan struggles with persistent erections—particularly after classmate Janine (correctly, as it turns out, rumored to be a GWOG—“Goes With Other Girls”) asks him to a weekend dance. Worse yet, out of the blue his ne’er-do-well father shows up with Feldon, the child of an affair that caused Stan’s parents to split up five years ago. Despite events that conspire to suggest otherwise—capped by a day in which Stan cuts class and tryouts to care for Feldon, then has a semi-unplanned bedroom rendezvous with Janine that begins with premature ejaculation and ends with his mother walking in—Stan is actually the most responsible member of his household. Moreover, not only is he versed in coping with his high-strung mother and tempestuous little sister (skills that help with troubled Feldon), he is endowed with a mouth and body that usually take over to do or say the right things whenever mental paralysis sets in. When Stan does finally meltdown, help from unexpected quarters brings him through with no permanent damage. The third-person narration is filtered through Stan’s perceptions, and Cumyn demonstrates a great sense of phrasing: “Suddenly the wall of sound collapsed into rubble and everyone was clapping.”
The comedy and drama are both mild, but the two eminently likable teens at the center of it look capable of keeping heads and hearts in balance in a world subject to sudden tilts. (Fiction. 13-16)Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55498-119-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Groundwood
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
Readers who have been along with Alice on her journey from the start will enjoy this latest installment in a reliable series...
Alice and her friends take summer jobs aboard a cruise ship on the Chesapeake Bay following graduation.
Thrilled with the nearly two-to-one ratio of guys to girls that makes up for the low pay and drudgery of galley duty, Alice makes the most of her summer before college. She's torn between missing Patrick, who's in Barcelona, and enjoying flirtatious outings with Mitch, a 20-ish crew member who's taking the summer off from trapping muskrats in the Maryland marshes. Dramatic episodes large and small fill the weeks on the refurbished Seascape. A passenger accuses Alice of stealing her watch; another gets his kicks exposing himself when she comes to clean his room. A bee sting lands Liz in the hospital; Gwen breaks up with Austin and has her own shipboard romance. Pamela's needy, troubled mother arrives during the same week that her father and his girlfriend are on board. A rather old-fashioned plot with a tone of comfortable familiarity mixes with a smattering of innuendo and scatological humor. Alice observes it all from her place on the verge of adulthood, pondering what the future holds for her as she looks back over her life so far.
Readers who have been along with Alice on her journey from the start will enjoy this latest installment in a reliable series as it begins to wind down . (Fiction. 13-15)Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4424-4588-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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