Book Review - The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler

This book begins with a guy named Froggy going up the main characters shirt. Don't get the wrong idea. I don't usually do that in the first paragraph, but in this book of teenage angst and self discovery, it works.

Virginia Shreves believes she was switched at birth because there is no way she came from her family of skinny over achievers. Her mom is a celebrated adolescent psychologist with a serious obsession with exercise. Her dad is the classic golfing all-American sports fan. She has two picture perfect siblings. Anaïs is beautiful and slender and living in Africa working with the Peach Corps before she goes to medical school.

Her brother Byron is good looking and charismatic and no one has anything bad to say about him. Virginia, on the other hand, is fat. "Not fat, fat. More like chubby fat." She loves to surf the internet, watch T.V., and eat. She has a best friend too but through a cruel twist of fate, Shannon has been whisked across the country so that her dad can do research on onions for his next book.

Virginia lives by the "Fat Girl Code of Conduct." One of the rules insists that she makes out with Froggy (yes, that is his real name), in private but not subject him to being seen with her in public. She avoids the cafeteria at all cost because she doesn't really have any friends to sit with. Spending the lunch hour huddled in a bathroom stall and inhaling Twinkies has become normal for her and she prefers it to facing certain humiliation.

The school cliques are a bit stereotypical but as Virginia finds, not everyone is as perfect as they appear. Even her perfect family has its secrets. Virginia is pretty content to live life the way she always have, letting people walk all over her and blending into the background, until one of her perfect family members falls from grace and turns her world upside down. She has to face the fact that not everything is the way she thought it was and decide whether she has the courage to break out of the mold that has been created for her.

This book does focus on weight loss as Virginia struggles to loose weight to please her mother and fit in at school, but several characters do their part to teach her that body image is not all about what you weight. It is exciting to watch as Virginia grows and becomes her own person, confident and healthy. She learns to develop new friendships and hobbies and overcome her own personal challenges along the way.

In the end, nothing is the way Virginia expected it would be but that's okay because life really is what you make of it. You can't spend your whole life worrying about what other people think of you. It is what you think of yourself that really matters.

The Earth, My Butt, and other Big Round Things was named "Best Book for young Adults" by the American Library Association and is the winner of a Michael L. Printz Honor for Excellence in young Adult Literature.