Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher

"Well I want to go on record as saying the sooner you learn you're your own life's accountant, the sooner you'll have tools to hammer out a decent life."

Tomorrow I'll be attending Teen Book Con, a convention for Young Adult Literature that is to be held in Houston. When I found out about a convention for my favorite genre, I immediately made plans to road trip it down there and roped a few friends into going down with me.

Chris Crutcher is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at this event, so it follows that I would immediately rush over to the library in an attempt to find a book of his that interested me. I finally found Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, a book whose title had me a bit skeptical, but I figured it was worth giving a shot anyway.

Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes is the story of Eric Calhoune, a teenage boy who seems to be defined only by his weight. When he was younger, he befriended Sarah Byrnes, another girl outcasted from the school's social hierarchy because of the burns that cover her body (the result of a childhood injury). Now Eric has taken up swimming and these workouts have him shedding weight faster than he would have expected. Terrified that Sarah Byrnes will think he's trying to outgrow her, he gorges himself, doing his best to keep the weight so she won't be alone in her ugliness.

Then Sarah Byrnes stops talking. She stops responding to the people around her. She snaps in the middle of class and somehow manages to entirely shut down, causing her to be sent to the hospital to tend to her mental health and throwing her best friend into an inner chaos that has him scared and angry, desperately trying to understand what made her snap and why the pain suddenly became unbearable.

I was surprised with how much I truly enjoyed this book. Like I mentioned before, I was a bit skeptical from the get-go. I'm definitely not a big fan of fat-shaming and figured it would turn out to be one of those cheesy books where suddenly they all start to look better and then the world is nicer because they're pretty. However, it was very different than I expected. The book ended up straying from superficial contemporaries and actually dealing with a lot of heavy issues that teens deal with on a daily basis. There was no discounting of a person's pain, but the simple acknowledgement that it is there and that we must each find a way to make it through, regardless of how hard it gets.

My only real complaint with the book was that many of the characters weren't as multifaceted as I had expected them to be. Each seemed to be defined by a single personality trait or part of their appearance that overshadowed all else about them, making them seem two dimensional, even while dealing with some very complex issues. It wasn't a huge problem, but more of a situation that kept nagging me near the end of the novel.

Overall, I really did enjoy this book and the way it dealt with many interesting points of view on a plethora of subjects. I really enjoyed getting in Eric's head throughout the story and understanding why he made the decisions he did. He was definitely a very interesting character to get to know.

Rating: ★★★☆☆
"Because the other day when I saw how hard it was for Mobe to go to the hospital to see her, I was embarrassed that I didn't know her better, that I ever laughed at one joke about her. I was embarrassed that I let some kid go to school with me for twelve years and turned my back on pain that must be unbearable. I was embarrassed that I haven't found a way to include her somehow the way Mobe has."