Big Fat Manifesto (in the paperback edition the title starts with “My”) is another book about an overweight girl. Sort of like the heroine in Dumplin’, Jamie Carcaterra doesn’t carry around deep shame about being fat, though she does carry around a deep awareness of it and how she’s perceived as a result of it. And not surprisingly, she’s not quite as confident as she tries so hard to be. Regardless, for her senior year, she decides to write an entire column about weight and related issues in her school newspaper in the hopes of winning a specific journalism scholarship. But Jamie isn’t stuck in her room, hiding from the world, working on her column. No, she has a lot of other things going on—a couple close friends, a boyfriend, a school play.

The book is set up with Jamie’s articles breaking up the chapters, so we get a lot of her direct voice, and it’s really good. She’s smart and a tad snarky but not overly so. The articles are interesting and show a real understanding of what it is to be overweight in America now, and some of the things that are most irritating about the way the media and people in general perceive and talk about fat people. First off, she takes issue with that annoying thing they do when talking about large people on TV—show obese, headless torsos walking down the street. She refers to the “obesity epidemic” itself as “hoo-ha,” which cracked me up. She talks about the absurdity of sizing for women’s clothing (don’t get me started on the fact that I can’t get shirts with sleeves that actually reach my wrists, but that’s not in the book so I’ll stop). She calls out the fact that it’s become socially acceptable to mock fat people.

For a good portion of the book, much of her column centers around a major event in her life—her boyfriend, Burke, is having gastric bypass surgery because he too is morbidly obese. And Jamie doesn’t like this. She is concerned because of health reasons, but there’s also a little bit of her vulnerability coming into play. If he loses a bunch of weight, will he still be her Burke, and will he still care about her? He experiences several complications along the way, and that and her column lead to some twists in her quest for the scholarship.

Not everyone is going to appreciate Jamie’s voice. She is sort of an angry fat girl with a bone to pick, after all, but I think that the book makes a lot of really interesting points. And it definitely does it with style.