I really enjoyed this book for a few reasons, they way it handled having a girl who is overweight and not fitting into her family, the way it showed how people react to sexual assault, and how it dealt with a teenager girl finding herself and becoming more comfortable with who she is.

I really identified with Virginia and her struggles, this is probably the first time I have really seen myself in a character and it was really refreshing. This is a new all-time favorite!

Where was this book when I was in middle school/high school?

I started out not liking this book. Virginia is bossed around by her "perfect" family; she has no friends; she eats to comfort herself. Her mother is an adolescent psychologist and should, therefore, be a great mom to a teenager, but she's way too concerned about the family's image to be a real parent. And Virginia has NO backbone. I only kept reading because 1) I was in the car, listening to the audio version on a longish commute to work, and 2) the narrator is excellent. I mean, really excellent.

Early on in the book, Perfect Brother Byron gets kicked out of college for date rape and is sent home. He doesn't get punished; in fact, no one in the family talks about "the incident" at all. He even gets to go to a Yankees playoffs game with his dad. He is given permission to move to France for the rest of the semester ... it's like his family just wants to sweep the whole thing under the rug. Meanwhile, Virginia is traumatized by the whole thing and has nowhere to turn because mentioning what's bothering her will ruin the family's reputation. Argh.

Around Thanksgiving, things change and the story gets much better. Virginia develops a backbone, first of all, and starts being herself. And with that backbone comes some self-confidence. And then she makes friends. And things are better. My favorite part (aside from the hair dye incident) is when Virginia's dad says something like, "It looks like you've slimmed down," and her response is, "Dad, I don't like it when you talk about my body. It's not yours to discuss." Wahoo!

I thought I wouldn't like this book, but I did. If you get a chance, try the audio version. :)

I first read this book as a teenager and fell absolutely in love with it. I went on to re-read it several times and when I started the Banned Book Club, I HAD to make our members read this book! It’s number 34 on ALA’s Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books (2000-2009). The group loved the idea of the book and even went on to nickname it the “butt book”!

It’s always nerve wracking to re-read a book you loved as a child, because you don’t know what you’ll do if adult-you actually hates the book. It’s been a good 7 years since I last read the butt book and I was a little worried when I started reading it again after all these years. I needn’t have worried at all, because I ended up liking it a lot!

There are a few cliches, but I forgive them because of when this book was first written (2005). This book was so ahead of its time! It’s a coming of age story of 15-year-old Virginia, a plus-sized teenager with an inferiority complex.

15-year-old me obviously found this book extremely relatable, being a plus-sized teenager in a thin family. I received a lot of unsolicited comments from relatives as a child. The line “think how much prettier you’d look if only you lost weight” was the soundtrack to my childhood.

In Virginia’s case, she has a lot more issues to contend with. Her mom’s an adolescent psychologist who listens to every child’s problems except her own, her father constantly compliments skinny girls, and her brother (whom she idolizes) gets kicked out of Columbia for a reason I cannot mention for fear of spoiling the book.

This is Virginia’s story of learning to accept who she is and also making positive changes in her life. Sure, things become all sunshine and rainbows at the end of the novel, but it’s YA. Of course it has a happy ending. This book helped me a lot as a child and as an adult, I really appreciate Carolyn Mackler for writing it.

3.5 ⭐️

Not sure how I missed this gem when it came out 15 years ago. I read this in a day because I really wanted to see where it went. I loved the heartbreak and the humor. I felt rage and hope. I cheered on Virginia as she started to come into her own. Can't wait to read the sequel.

This book is a TIME CAPSULE.

I read this exclusively because I got an ARC of the sequel, which is inexplicably coming out this year. Yes. A sequel. To this 2003 contemporary. Which couldn’t do a better job of capturing a bygone, offensive, outdated way of looking at weight if that were its goddamn purpose.

For the most part, this is just a strange reading experience. When I was in elementary school, I was obsessed with reading contemporaries well above the age I was supposed to be reading. (“Mom, what’s a blowjob?” -Me at age nine because of a contemporary I can’t remember but which I do know had a girl swimming on the cover and “10th grade and up” written in pencil in the margin of the title page.)

It was really easy to access these books because I lived in a neighborhood with a library in it, and the library then had a very small, very limited young adult section. It was pretty much all early-to-mid 2000s contemporaries like this one. And since the whole thing was limited to a handful of shelves, I read almost all of them. I didn’t even like them, necessarily. I read them disinterestedly, with detachment, as if I were a researcher studying slugs who (correctly) views slugs as being mildly disgusting.

Also like slugs, these books were largely interchangeable. (Slugs all look the same, I think, and I will not confirm this because I refuse to look it up and therefore voluntarily regard a slug.)

Reading this book was like being forced to reread a book nine- or ten-year-old me read with the clear, clear eyes that a decade of character development has brought me.

It was not a fun experience.

Outside of that, even, there was a wildly outdated depiction of being overweight. It is not impossible to be fat and healthy. Any generalized stigmatization of fatness is an unfair one. But in this book, fat is equated to bad.

Virginia’s being fat (and the only fat person in her family) is such a demonstrably negative thing in this book that she hates herself, and believes that everyone in her family hates her, and thinks she’s ugly and that everyone thinks she’s ugly. She thinks her best friend is embarrassed of her and tired of her. She thinks her parents are ashamed of her.

She turns to crash diets and over-exercise and even self-harm. By the end of the book, she appears to suddenly love herself on the basis of an eyebrow piercing and a bathroom dye job, but none of the really damaging things in this book are confronted. Including vitriolic, self-hating lists of what fat girls are allowed to do in relationships and otherwise.

It was 2003. A lot has changed since then. But that doesn’t mean I enjoyed reading it.

Bottom line: The sequel has a hell of a lot of damage repair to do in order to justify its existence.

this book is so funny. it will have you laughing through the whole thing. don't think the book is weird by its title this book is amazing. totally recommend it.

Really enjoyed this when I was in high school, though the details are hazy now.