Libby Strout. She’s famous. Not for the usual fame of You Tube Star, Twitter Queen, Movie star or Singer. Libby was
known as the World’s Fattest Teen. When she finally got so big she needed hospital care, her house had to be taken apart around her, and a crane lifted her out – not into an ambulance, but a truck.
She received hate mail both while she lay in hospital and when she got home. Everybody wanted to tell her what they thought of her. No one asked her why she ate so much, to be then labelled as such.
The truth is, Libby lost her mother to a sudden brain aneurysm. She was there and then she wasn’t. Just like that. Libby’s mum was her world, and her father’s too. Grief was why Libby got so big. Grief was how her father let it happen.
But that was two years ago. Libby has lost 200 lbs. She’s still big, but she’s much happier in herself and ready to take on the big, wide, world. Especially going to high school. People might think they know her, but this is the new Libby Strout.
Jack Masselin is popular at school – not with everyone, but enough people to make high school okay. They think they know him, with his swagger, his ‘I’m too cool to talk to you, or even ‘take notice of you.’ His girlfriend is gorgeous and more popular, and together they make a golden couple. Until Jack makes a mistake.
Jack has a brain disorder that doesn’t allow him to recognise faces. The normal process of seeing a face and logging it to memory for the next time they meet them, doesn’t work in Jack. Sure, sometimes normally recognising people takes a few moments, but with Jack, he doesn’t even recognise his own family.
He can see his mother while she’s talking to him, but if she leaves the room and comes back, she’s like a stranger again. This happens all day every day for Jack, and he hasn’t told a soul. He just acts cool, distant, aloof, in order to give him time to figure out who the person talking to him might be. He calls it face blindness. The medical term is Prosopagnosia. His mistake is kissing his girlfriend’s lookalike cousin.
This ‘I’m the man’ attitude has attracted others like him. Guys who laugh at others misfortunes, make fun of others and are all about the laughs. Going along with his mates, Jack and Libby have an altercation. This puts them both in school group counselling and community service.
Libby might be new at high school, but she’s quite prepared to stand up for herself and others. She soon proves it – more than once.
Jack has to apologise for his actions, which makes him think a bit deeper than his own problems and way of dealing with everyday life with his secret. Libby’s presence also reminds him of years before. He’s known her longer than she knows, and soon they will know each other almost as well as they know themselves. When their complex universes collide they create a new one, a better one – Holding up the Universe.
Quick Review
A gorgeous love story between two teens with more than the usual dramas and demons of high school and teendom to navigate. The issues that characters Jack and Libby are dealing with are complex, with valid triggers in their past.
Libby is the fat girl with a claim to fame she’d rather forget, and Jack is aloof, and popular in an off-hand way, with a secret not even his family knows. The push and pull of peer pressure, understanding, shame, courage, self belief and body-shaming is a complicated platform for true love to flourish, but love it truly is.
Jack and Libby are two book-teens I’d like to meet in real-life. They thought they were somehow broken. The opposite is the truth.
Author – Jennifer Niven
Age – 14+
Other Books by Jennifer Niven
(Love, Romance, Brain Disorder, Body shaming, Fat shaming, Obese, Overweight, Peer pressure, Self worth, Bullying, Courage, Prosopagnosia, Face Blindness, Secret, High School, Family, Dance, Dancing, Engineering, Inventor)