Nice Girls Endure

June 6, 2016
Sixteen-year-old Chelsea Duvay is an overweight introvert and musical theater aficionado trying to survive high school bullies and her mother’s ham-fisted attempts to help her lose weight. After Chelsea is assaulted and humiliated in an alley at her school’s Spring Fling dance, a friendship with eccentric and supportive classmate Melody, anxiety medication, and a school video project help her push back against the trauma she’s suffered. Told from Chelsea’s perspective in chapters that are usually just a few pages long, the story unfolds like a series of stream-of-conscious anecdotes or diary entries, with little plot continuity connecting her musings about her relationship with her parents, the taunts and criticisms she endures, and her hard-to-shake feelings of inadequacy and embarrassment. Struyk-Bonn (Whisper) gives Chelsea a blunt voice and frank wit, and her hard-won triumphs and ability to regain her self-confidence come without resorting to oft-seen and ill-advised weight-loss plotlines. However, she also winds up something of an untethered narrator, flitting from topic to topic. Ages 14–up. Agent: Dawn Michelle Frederick, Red Sofa Literary.

September 1, 2016

Gr 8 Up-Chelsea Duvay loves singing and dreams of opening her own shoe store someday. But first she must endure the daily nightmare of high school, where no one sees past Chelsea's weight. She manages to, as the title implies, endure these indignities and ridicule from all sides. She even begins a tentative friendship with a classmate during their work on a project. Then Chelsea is attacked by the popular boys in her class. They share humiliating photos of her online, but instead of being pushed to the edge, the protagonist reaches inside herself to find her voice and go on. While Struyk-Bonn makes the smart choice not to tie Chelsea's empowerment to a hokey plot about weight loss, she still spends much of the novel detailing the teen's mockery and suffering. This doesn't really advance the narrative, and Struyk-Bonn's short, declarative sentences make the narrative feel more clinical than empathetic. This technique also seems intended to engage struggling readers, but instead, it fails to fully develop the characters and thus makes it hard to care about them. Even Chelsea's supposed strength in the face of her abuse ends up reading more like an unrealistic flat affect than an endearing character trait. This protagonist deserves more than endless abuse and humiliation with a small sliver of hinted-at happiness at the end. VERDICT Not recommended for purchase.-Angie Manfredi, Los Alamos County Library System, NM

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2016
How much derision can a teen endure?Chelsea has a fantastic singing voice, dark brown curly hair, beautiful feet, and skin that she describes (never mentioning race; everyone seems white) as both "olive" and "pink." Also, she's fat. She knows it's unfair that "overweight people are modern-day lepers," but that doesn't alleviate the pain of her mother's enforced food restrictions, schoolmates who bump, poke, taunt, and leer, and little kids who chant, "Fatty, fatty, two-by-four. Couldn't fit through the bathroom door. So she did it on the floor." In her corner are kooky classmate Melody, Chelsea's first friend, and Dad, who makes tasty snacks for her, sings along to movie musicals with her, and saves money for her life goal: opening a shoe store. Chelsea slogs through dismal days, and then things get worse. Fat-hating bullies, sublimating their attraction to her, beat her, rip her shirt and bra, and post photos of her breasts online. Struyk-Bonn portrays the assault's aftermath particularly well, deftly showing Chelsea's traumatization through actions rather than emotional descriptions. After a while, Chelsea pulls herself back up, using a film autobiography assignment, a therapist, Melody, and a crucial, empowering declaration about not having lost any weight: "Who cares?" It's not a loud victory, but it's a relieving one. Valuable for showing a miserable fat protagonist getting happier--without the seemingly obligatory weight-loss arc. (Fiction. 13-16)

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.