Back to Blog
Staying fat for sarah byrnes cliff notes5/10/2023 ![]() ![]() Though it’s an Issue Book, the characters (almost) all seem very human, and aren’t just flat charicatures of their Issue. I’m not at all religious, but I appreciated that there were thoughtful, reasonable Christian characters alongside the more fervently hard-line orthodox ones–making all the religious characters in a story into super-devoted nutjobs usually seems like a cheap shot to me. ![]() Occasionally the treatment of these subjects gets a little heavy-handed, but for the most part I can see that this was done with good intentions, and there’s a good amount of balance between viewpoints. There’s mention of physical and emotional abuse, neglect, abortion, suicide–all the fun stuff that makes this book so bannable. But then Sarah Byrnes shuts down and checks into a mental hospital, and Eric makes it his job to find out what’s going on. ![]() You can tell just from the back-cover book summary that Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes is an Issue Book: overweight highschooler Eric “Moby” (as in Dick) Calhoune has been friends with tough, snarky, majorly-scarred childhood burn victim Sarah Byrnes for a long time, and he even upped his caloric intake when he joins the school swim team and starts getting in shape so that Sarah Byrnes won’t think he’s going to ditch her once he’s not fat anymore. ![]() In the spirit of Banned Books Week, on Monday I went by the library and picked up a challenged YA classic: Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, by Chris Crutcher. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |