Fat, a Love Story - Hardcover

Grade 10-12 Sixteen-year-old Rita Formica, a 200-pound compulsive eater, takes a job as a bicycle messenger. Her employer is a 32-year-old eccentric loner, Arnold Bromberg, who operates a flagging cheesecake business. Rita falls in love at first glimpse with aristocratic fitness fanatic Robert Swann, a shallow Adonis who ignores her existence. Desperate to capture Robert's attention, she accepts her friend Nicole's offer to act as bait, only to be devastated when the two begin a passionate affair. She turns to Arnold for solace, and responds to his concern by declaring her love for him. From this point on, the book loses its integrity as Rita displaces her food obsession with a compulsion to seduce Arnold, which she satisfies after a mock wedding ceremony. While Fat has a fast-moving plot, memorable characterizations, and a well-integrated setting, it ultimately fails because of the improbability of the idyllic May-December relationship. Wersba opts for the sensational climax, which is not consistent with the character exposition. Arnold is brilliant, empathic, and profoundly philosophical, yet is swept away by a naive 16 year old. Rita undergoes an unrealistic instantaneous transformation from egocentricity to Earth Mother. Robert Lipsyte's One Fat Summer (Bantam, 1978) is a more focused treatment of the issues of obesity and self-growth. Merilyn S. Burrington, Vergennes Union High School, Vt.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Wersba's sometimes skewed, always funny view of the outrages of adolescence usually centers on odd people who love one another, however briefly, and then part. But happy endings abound in this novel, about obese Rita Formica's hopeless love for Robert Swann. When Rita first sees Robert, she is a messenger for Arnold Bromberg's fledgling cheesecake company in Sag Harbor. She joins Robert's fitness club just to see him but loses him to her own best friend. She survives, though, and finds real romance with a person most readers will have adored from his first appearance in the book. Two gentle, wonderfully human souls fall in love, without (or in spite of) weight loss, after trodding a path strewn with heartbreak and humor. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.