Monday, May 19, 2008

Two books with chocolate on the cover

Tricia Rayburn's book, The Melting of Maggie Bean, is a good addition to books about eating disorders, which are wildly popular among 7th grade girls especially. Maggie is a very overweight girl who eats vast quantities of chocolate to cope with her father's unemployment and the general unhappiness of her family life. She wants to try out for the Water Wings, the school synchronized swim team, because she is a good swimmer and her mother helped start the team, but is afraid because of her weight. Her parents make her go to a weight loss support group, and she starts the long process of losing weight, exercising, and trying to improve her life. Some of this book stretches credulity a little (Are swim teams really that popular?), but in general is a good addition to weight issue fiction.

Loved the cover of Rebecca Sparrow's The Year Nick McGowan Came to Stay, but there really was very little mention of chocolate. There were, however, a distractingly large number of references to 1980s pop culture. Set in 1989, and in Australia to boot, I couldn't get into this story of a girl whose father volunteers to keep a problem student at their house because he was no longer accepted as a boarder at the school because of discipline problems.

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