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Summary
Summary
Sixteen-year-old Lara, winner of beauty pageants and Homecoming Queen, is distressed and bewildered when she starts gaining weight and becomes a fat girl
Author Notes
Cherie Bennett was born in Buffalo, N.Y. She attended Wayne State University, and then the University of Michigan.
Cherie and her husband, Jeff Gottesfeld, often write on teen themes. They wrote the Trash series together, while Cherie authored the best-selling series Sunset Island. Cherie's fiction includes "Life in the Fat Land" and " Zink." Some of her other works include Girls In Love and Turn Me On. Her syndicated column, "Hey, Cherie!" appears in papers coast to coast. She is also one of America's finest young playwrights and a back-to-back winner of the Kennedy Center's "New Visions/New Voices" playwriting award. Cherie and Jeff also write under the pseudonymns C. J. Anders and Zoey Dean.
Cherie and Jeff live in Nashville and Los Angeles.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A beauty queen develops a rare (and fictional) weight-gaining disorder. "Reading this often artificial novel for insight into [issues of weight, self-image and beauty] is a little like eating peanut M&Ms for the protein, but it's a similarly addictive experience," said PW. Ages 12-up. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
When pageant queen Lara begins gaining weight, no amount of dieting and exercise seems to help. It turns out she has a rare disease--so rare it only exists in this novel. The author's use of an imaginary disease to fuel an examination of very real problems subverts any pretensions to seriousness the book might have had; in fact, this is the kind of book that succeeds despite its author's best intentions. Like a two-pound box of chocolates, it's pure guilty pleasure. From HORN BOOK Fall 1998, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Gr. 6^-9. Lara Ardeche has it made: pretty, great boyfriend, queen of the prom. But when Lara starts inexplicably gaining weight--and eventually tops 200 pounds--she learns what it is like to be on the wrong side of the scale. The story reads like a TV movie of the week: when it starts, Lara is dreaming of becoming Miss America, but by the end of the year, she's twice her old size, most of her friends have disappeared, her parent's "perfect" marriage has dissolved, and her mother has made a feeble attempt at suicide. Lara doesn't gain her weight the old-fashioned way; her bulk-up is the result of a newly discovered metabolic syndrome (so new that there's no medicine for it). This device is hokey (and allows for Lara to start losing weight as the story concludes), but it does let the story concentrate on the weight gain rather than having to deal with underlying reasons for overeating. Kids (and that should really read girls) will probably not be bothered in the least by the story's predictability. Lara's angst about weight no doubt mirrors their own. Readers will be totally caught up in Lara's struggle to find her true self under all that weight, and perhaps they will learn the lesson that Lara does--there's much more to every girl than what can be seen with the naked eye. --Ilene Cooper
School Library Journal Review
Gr 8 UpLara, 16, is just what most girls want to be: thin, beautiful, and smart. She's dating one of the cutest boys in school, and she's popular. Then she notices that she's gained a few pounds. Unconcerned, she starts to work out harder and watches what she eats. However, her weight keeps going up, and soon Lara weighs over 200 pounds. She spends a week in a hospital on a controlled liquid diet, and the doctors and nutritionists can't understand why she becomes even heavier. Suddenly, she is no longer popular and is faced with ridicule from everyone around her. The story of Lara's weight gain is set against a backdrop of her outwardly perfect, but deeply troubled family life: her father is having a long-term affair, her mother is insecure and obsessed with her (and Lara's) appearance, and her younger brother is angry and rebellious. All of these characters and situations are skillfully drawn, resulting in a compelling story. Bennett captures the voices of teenagers well and offers insight into what it's like to be overweight in a society that is so caught up in appearances. Lara is further challenged when she finds out that the cause of her sudden weight gain is Axell-Crowne Syndrome (readers learn in an author's note that the disease is fictional). This plot device allows for more insight into Lara's character, as she struggles with being overweight through no "fault" of her own. While the fabrication of the disease may surprise or even disappoint some readers, most will find this an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.Dina Sherman, Brooklyn Children's Museum, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A teenager who has it all--perfect body, perfect personality, perfect grades, perfect boyfriend--loses it when she gains a hundred pounds in this unsubtle but ultimately savvy problem novel that reads like an Alicia Silverstone vehicle waiting to happen. A 118-pound beauty pageant veteran at 16, Lara is elected Homecoming Queen while still a junior. Then, for no discernible reason, she starts to gain weight, and her glittery world comes crashing down. Desperately putting her complacent philosophy--""If you dream it, you can do it""--to the test, she embarks on increasingly stringent programs of diet and exercise, to no avail. Drugs and counseling fail, too; she gains more weight even while on a monitored starvation diet before learning that she might have Axell-Crowne Syndrome, a rare metabolic disorder with no known cure. Meanwhile, as the numbers on the scale climb steadily and Lara's self-image goes into a tailspin, she experiences the social cost of being fat: the comments that range from catty to helpful to devastating; the unwarranted assumptions about her personal habits; the skepticism of peers and doctors; the creeping sense of being invisible. Bennett takes Lam through the whole patch with brutal directness, allowing her one loyal best friend and a boyfriend who means it when he says he still loves her. While the hazard of setting unrealistic standards of beauty is a familiar theme in teen novels, the author lays out the issues with unusual clarity, sharp insight, and cutting irony. The book's aim is not high culture but high school culture, and it scores for pure entertainment value. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
