A Cinderella tale for fat-shamed women that unfortunately misses the mark.
How far will a woman go to lose weight? Acrobat Films intends to find out by hosting an extreme weight-loss program, but they may have chosen the wrong women for their documentary.
Alice signed up for Acrobat Production’s second documentary after ruining her husband Clancy’s awards night. His film, De Facto, lost to Acrobat’s debut: Waisted, the first in a planned trilogy examining women and weight. Worse, Alice’s sheer fatness embarrassed him. When she married Clancy, Alice was thin—thin from heartbreak over her last relationship and then with joy over her newfound love for Clancy. Seven years and countless bags of M&Ms later, she can barely squeeze into a size 18. Desperate and furious with Clancy’s disapproval, Alice is ready to defect to his enemy’s camp. There, at the posh Privation mansion, she joins six other women, including Daphne, a talented makeup artist who ended up at Privation despite her husband’s delight in her every curve. Acrobat’s methods, however, quickly devolve from extreme to degrading. Naked weigh-ins, Machiavellian trainers, Byzantine exercise equipment, starvation rations, and speed (masquerading as not-so-mysterious “vitamins”) quickly melt off the pounds but also break down the women’s psyches. That is, until Alice, Daphne, and their roommate, Hania, decide to fight back. The consequences of Acrobat’s unmasking, however, remain frustratingly unclear. Meyers (The Widow of Wall Street, 2017, etc.) spins a compelling tale, raising critical questions about familial, social, and cultural messages about body image; each woman at Privation, fat-shamed on a daily basis, has lost her sense of self. Yet Meyers’ portraits are also riddled with every stereotype of the overweight American woman, traumatized by well-meaning but bitterly critical mothers and judgmental husbands, stuffing down her emotions with handfuls of sugar and butter. Although Alice, Daphne, Hania, and the other women rebel against Acrobat’s evil plan, their lives post-Privation remain food- and body-size obsessed.
A Cinderella tale for fat-shamed women that unfortunately misses the mark.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3138-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
