HEY, REMEMBER FAT GLENDA?

Sara Mayberry has moved again and her best friend in Me and Fat Glenda (1972) takes center stage here, inspired by a handsome new eighth-grade English teacher and encouraged by Sara's rhyming letters (""Every time/You take a beating,/You try to make it up/By eating"") to lose some of that fat. At a Halloween party, she's thin enough to make a sensation as a feather-boa-ed dance hall queen and share first prize (awarded by Mr. Hartley himself) with sexy Cathanne, her pushy rival for Mr. H.'s attention. Glenda sheds more pounds for the school variety show audition--but, alas, Mr. Hartley chooses Cathanne as his star and Glenda as assistant director (read gopher). It takes some time and the suggestion of a sympathetic boy, Roddy (her arch-enemy in the former book but a likely boyfriend by the end of this one) for Glenda to say no to Mr. Hartley's exploitation--and more time, realistically, to get back on the diet wagon she's abandoned when not picked for the show. Readers who remember fat Glenda will be satisfied by the course and outcome of her struggle, though it's set in a society of bitchy and shallow 8th-grade girls which gives the novel a trace of the same tone.