SKINNY by Diana Spechler
My rating: 1.5 of 5 stars
Who amongst us has not dived headfirst into a box of ice cream, oreos, or other nutritional wasteland in order to soothe hurt and angry feelings? A familiarity with that coping mechanism caused me to accept for review Skinny, a book whose main character is a 26-year old woman who cannot stop eating after the death of her father. Unfortunately, while the premise of the book appealed to me, the execution did not.
At the age of 23, Gray Lachmann has a blow-out fight with her observant Jewish father over her long-term relationship with an aspiring comedian named Mikey, who happens not to be Jewish. Gray and her father do not speak for three years, until her 26th birthday when the two go out for dinner. At the end of the evening, her father dies, and Gray proceeds to blame herself, although the reader does not learn why until the end of the book.
Gray’s father was a morbidly obese man who harbored a secret that led to destructive eating habits. Following his death, Gray begins to mimic his compulsive eating, until she has gained fifteen pounds, and sabotaged her relationship with Mikey. As executor of his will, Gray discovers that he has made a bequest to an unknown woman and her teenage daughter. After tracking them down on the internet, Gray learns that the daughter, Eden, is attending summer "fat" camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Believing Eden to be her sister, Gray gets a job as a camp counselor so that they can forge a relationship. Gray is convinced that if she reveals the truth to Eden about their shared parentage, she will make peace with her father and end her torturous relationship with food.
Shortly after arriving at camp, Gray abruptly stops eating, and begins an affair with Bennett, the 41-year old fitness instructor. When Mikey arrives at the camp and confronts Gray about her affair, she finally reveals the secret she has been keeping about the night her father died. In a plot twist at the end, Gray learns more about her father, and realizes that things are not always what they seem. In letting go of her secret, she finds that she had more in common with her father than she thought, and is ultimately able to end her battle with food.
This book missed the mark for me in several respects. More often than not, the characters felt more like caricatures to me than real people. I appreciated Gray’s acid tongue, and her self-deprecating humor, but I never felt like there was more to her than her biting observations. Bennett, the older man who provides an outlet for Gray to substitute her food obsession with sex, is merely an aging Adonis. I wanted to know something, anything, more about him, to make him a more interesting character. How he felt about the fact that he had an overweight child despite being fitness obsessed himself, or the fact that he was working at a summer camp at the age of 41, were aspects that could have been explored. And, although the author provided a fair dose of comic relief with Lewis, the huckster camp owner and Sheena, the rebel counselor, in the end both characters were more quirk than substance. Finally, while the author deftly captures the pettiness and fluid alliances that are the hallmark of the world of adolescent girls, there is not much depth to any of the teen campers. Instead, for the most part, they embody various stereotypes of the alienated “fat kid“. One notable exception is that side of Eden’s awkward, trying-too-hard, laughing-too-loud, persona that painfully evokes the strivings of those on the fringes of the in-crowd.
Apart from the characters, some of the plot specifics had me shaking my head. For example, immediately upon arriving at the camp, Gray miraculously stops her compulsive eating, and seemingly overnight, sheds her excess weight. In fact, she goes so far as to develop what reads like anorexia in the space of a few weeks. I am aware that anorexia can take over after a dieter has success and then cannot stop, but this plot development just did not ring true to me given the roots of Gray’s overeating. Interestingly, I think part of the reason that this felt so wrong to me is that I thought the author perfectly depicted the way in which Gray tries to satisfy her expansive hunger for emotional sustenance with food. As the book opens, Gray knows that she is abusing food, and she knows why, but she is baffled as to how to stop it. The fact that she would immediately stop eating upon meeting Bennett was simply too much for me to accept given what had come before.
I will say that the book picked up somewhat for me at the end. As I was reading I had the sense that this book might be a good fit for those who enjoy YA offerings. For other opinions, please check out the blog stops on the tour at TLC Book Tours.
I received an advance reader’s edition of Skinny from the publisher through TLC Book Tours. Skinny will be released in May of 2011.
