Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsFat Chance review
Reviewed in Canada on May 18, 2003
The book Fat Chance by Lesléa Newman was, overall, an okay book. The facts were interesting but scattered, and the appealing part came up in the second half, leaving 80 pages of reading that would have put me to sleep if I didn't force my eyes to stay open. The first 80 pages of the book were the first half of Judi Liebowitz's diary about her very, very boring life. It was all about the people at school teasing her about her weight, how her English teacher Ms. Roth was extremely fat, how Nancy Pratt was extremely skinny and the most popular girl in school, about her "diet", how she has a huge crush on this guy named Richard Weiss... Judi just goes on and on and on about her tremendously dull life.
On page 81, the book finally gets into Judi's bulimia problem. While in the bathroom one day, she hears someone throwing up in one of the stalls and finds out that it is Nancy Pratt, the most admired, fashionable, skinny girl in school. Judi soon found out that Nancy had been throwing up her lunch, and how she binges and purges every day. Nancy uses two fingers to stick down her throat, making her gag so she barfs all her food up into the toilet bowl.
Judi becomes very jealous of Nancy's figure and desperately tries to be like her, even if it means suffering Nancy's secret binge-and-purge cycles of bulimia. After a while, Judi is guarding the door while Nancy purges in the bathroom. Nancy had taken especially long, and so Judi checks out Nancy's stall and finds out that Nancy has passed out while puking up her food and must go to the hospital.
Judi kind of realizes that throwing up her food is dangerous, and she promises herself that she will never do it again. But can she keep that problem? Weight for Judi is no longer just another typical eighth-grade problem. It's a matter of life and death.
That is basically what happens in the rest of the book, but in between is issues about Judi's best friend and her having a fight and so on, and the information about bulimia is scattered and not detailed. It didn't learn much more than I already had learned about bulimia. What I did learn was that bulimics can sometimes find blood with their vomit, and this could be a problem. That's about it, though.
The book did not flow too well, and therefore was not of my liking. I would only recommend this book for required reading.
