Jamie is a senior in high school and, like so many kids in that year, doing too much including trying to change the world and fighting for her rights as a very fat girl. And not quietly: she's writing a column every week in the paper with her thoughts and fears and gripes. As her column raises all kinds of questions, so too, must she find her own private way in her world, with love popping up in an unexpected place, and satisfaction in her size losing ground to real frustration. Tapping into her own experience losing weight, her training as a psychotherapist, and the current fascination in the media for teens who are trying drastic weight-loss measures including surgery, Susan Vaught's searing and hilarious prose will grip readers of all sizes, leaving them eager to hear more. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

High school senior Jamie Carcaterra is not just fat; as she puts it, "I am THE Fat Girl, baby." In an attempt to enlighten fellow classmates about the indignities and injustices she faces daily, Jamie writes a weekly feature for her high school paper and calls it the Fat Girl Manifesto. The manifesto could land her a journalism scholarship for feature writing, which she desperately desires. Vaught (Trigger) upends stereotypes about fat girls via Jamie's bracing, take-no-prisoners columns and in Jamie's first-person account of her year. The supremely confident Fat Girl persona is hard to resist, and more believable than many of the situations the author piles on: the fat boyfriend who undergoes risky gastric bypass surgery and suffers complications; the overblown media reaction to Jamie's columns; the blossoming romance with the handsome high school paper's editor-in-chief. The novel reads in places more like a rant than an emotionally involving story, and much of the Fat Girl Manifesto will be familiar (vanity sizing, the ineffectiveness of fad diets, etc.). But teens who persevere will be rewarded with some priceless scenes, such as Jamie and friends going undercover to document the discriminatory behavior of sales clerks in a clothing boutique; and with carefully prepared revelations, especially Jamie's eventual awareness that she may be more limited by her anger than by her weight. Thought-provoking and, frequently, vigorous. Ages 12-up. (Jan.) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information