The fat heroine has been elevated to cover girl infive 2023Young Adult romance novels that feature not just big bodies, but dark skin, immigrant cultures and LGBTQ relationships. A content analysis of The Fall of Whit Rivera (Maldonado); The Dos and Donuts of Love (Jaigirdar); Her Good Side (Weatherspoon); Out of Character (Miller), and Then Everything Happens at Once (Girard)reveals a shift in the descriptive rhetoric of fatness and a move toward stories that embrace acceptance without (too much) guilt or a weight-loss blueprint. The characters recognize the effects of fatphobia and weight stigma in their lives, but fatness is not the books’ primary theme. The quest for love; family drama, and self-discovery are more prominent. It’s as if the protagonists aren’t fat at all.
I haven't added tags for all of the authors because of some uncertainty I had about whether or not all the protagonists ended their novels in happy romantic relationships: although the author writes that "A common thread in the stories is that no one is on a diet and yet they still get the happy ending" (14), I'm not sure that happiness is necessarily one in which the protagonist ends the novel in a committed relationship with either/both love interests. For example, one quotation given from the corpus is “The truth is, right now, I’m self-centered, a little selfish, and a little too concerned with doing what I want, when I want … For now, though, the only love story I can handle is the one with myself” (Girard, 2023, p. 415), that page number seems to come late in the book, and the synopsis does not specify that the protagonist changes her mind.
Here's the abstract:
I haven't added tags for all of the authors because of some uncertainty I had about whether or not all the protagonists ended their novels in happy romantic relationships: although the author writes that "A common thread in the stories is that no one is on a diet and yet they still get the happy ending" (14), I'm not sure that happiness is necessarily one in which the protagonist ends the novel in a committed relationship with either/both love interests. For example, one quotation given from the corpus is “The truth is, right now, I’m self-centered, a little selfish, and a little too concerned with doing what I want, when I want … For now, though, the only love story I can handle is the one with myself” (Girard, 2023, p. 415), that page number seems to come late in the book, and the synopsis does not specify that the protagonist changes her mind.