CHARLTON-TRUJILLO, e. E. Fat Angie Candlewick, 2013 264pp $19.95 ISBN 9780763661199 SCIS 1610650
There is a great deal of hate in this novel. Angie is overweight and bullied at school, and her brother, Wang, and her mother are nasty to her. Her beloved sister, a soldier, has been missing in Iraq for months, and given up for dead by her family. Angie sees her mother as a person who can’t be bothered with her living daughter, and her brother as a criminal in the making. Her father has left. She has known the boy over the road, Jake, since childhood, and he understands some of her pain, but Angie can’t accept that from him.
When a new girl arrives at school, called K.C. Romance (sic), Angie finds someone who likes her for her own sake, someone who can look through the extra flesh to the girl beneath. As Angie moves into what her sister had loved, basketball, she opens up the possibilities of respect from her classmates and her family.
Australian teenagers will find Fat Angie intriguing, but sometimes confusing. US soapies, films and songs provide some of the background, and are likely to be unfamiliar. Perhaps they will understand the bullying that goes on at Angie’s unpleasant school, where the girls and boys have honed their nastiness to a fine point. I hope they find it foreign, though I am afraid they may not.
The text is full of the patois of American adolescents, from ‘completely on the nine’ to ‘IHOP’, whatever that means. Just go with the flow, note the remarks of the therapists these troubled girls and boys attend, and you will find some compassion for their situation, behind the hate they show each other most of the time. Finally, the honesty evident in Fat Angie is quite disarming.
reviewed by Stella Lees