The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things

Title: The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things
Author: Carolyn Mackler
ISBN: 0763620912

Plot Summary: Virginia is a blonde, overweight ugly ducking born into a family of over-achieving swans. She deals with her negative emotions by either eating them away or engaging in various forms of self-injury. She carries on a romance with a classmate, Froggy, but hides it for fear of public ridicule, and misses her best friend, Shannon, a chronic stutterer, who has moved across the country with her parents. When her golden-boy brother is toppled off his pedestal, Virginia tries to find better ways of coping with her feelings about his mistakes, her life, and the world in general. In doing so, she must confront not only her family's bad habit of denial, but her own feelings of inadequacy and low self-worth, if she is to finally become more comfortable in her own skin.


Critical Evaluation: This book is painfully honest about how difficult it is to be an overweight teenage girl in today's society. Virginia's sense of humor, evident throughout her narrative, is all too often at her own expense. Yet although other characters treat her unfairly, the book never paints them as cartoon villains: the snotty "popular" girl, Brie, has an eating disorder; Virginia's mother projects her own feelings of insecurity onto her daughter, fearing that she will face the same social hardships she did as a girl; even Mrs. Crowley, Virginia's favorite teacher, makes a thoughtless remark about her finding new friends and later feels terrible about it. It is to the book's credit that it does not end with Virginia magically losing all her extra weight, becoming the most popular girl in school, and solving all of her family's problems overnight. However, Virginia is decidedly more at home with herself as the story progresses, and Mackler gives the reader hope that if she continues on her current path, her life will continue to improve.
Reader's Annotation: Virginia is an overweight, socially awkward New York teenager dealing with a family, social life, and love life that she feels are all more than she deserves. Through a series of adventures, discoveries, and traumatic events, she comes to a fuller understanding of who she is as a person and what she wants out of life.

About the Author: Carolyn Mackler was born in New York City in 1973. When she was young, her family moved to Upstate New York. She started making up stories at an early age, first dictating them into tapes which her mother transcribed, then writing them down herself. A social misfit in middle and high school, she came into her own in college, earning a degree in Art History from Vassar and spending a semester in Paris. During this time, her parents divorced, an event Carolyn found difficult to cope with. She worked a number of different jobs after graduation before publishing her first Young Adult novel, Love and Other Four-Letter Words. She currently lives in New York City with her husband and son, and continues to write.

Genre: Fiction: Body Issues


Curriculum Ties: Health and Wellness, Women's Studies

Booktalking Ideas:


Hook: Roller coasters, Virginia's eating habits, and other fluctuating things.
Approach: Character-based.
Ideas for Booktalk: Virginia eats out of stress, anxiety, to mask her feelings. After she goes to Dr. Love, she starts starving herself. When she visits Shannon for Thanksgiving, she eats only when hungry. Describe the path she takes from unhealthy to healthy attitudes towards food, increased self-awareness, and feeling more at home in her own skin. Examine how her mother's own issues with food and body image have influenced Virginia, and the steps she takes to overcome those issues.

Hook: Virginia meets and talks with the girl who accused her brother of date rape.
Approach: Scene-based.
Ideas for Booktalk: Why does she go there in the first place, and what does she hope to achieve? Does she know this to begin with? The girl's reaction is not what Virginia expects. Examine how her position of strength may influence Virginia's own path to self-realization. Way of confronting what no one else in her family, including Byron, is willing to do.

Hook: Virginia decides to spend Thanksgiving in Walla Walla with Shannon instead of in New York with her family.
Approach: Character and plot-based.
Ideas for Booktalk: What prompts Virginia to decide on this in the first place - and what makes her decide to follow through on it? Uses her own money, informs rather than asks her parents. Byron almost goes to Paris as a present after he is accused of date rape, but then the parents decide he should stay home because otherwise it might look bad to the school. Virginia's jealous of him, missing her friend, tired of dealing with her family.

Reading Level/Interest Age: Grades 7-12


Challenge Issues: Offensive language, sexual content, rape, eating disorders, self-injury, underage drinking.
Virginia frequently makes out with Froggy, her sort-of-boyfriend, although they never go any further than that in the course of the book. She also experiences disordered eating, witnesses a bulimic classmate, and injures herself in various ways to cope with negative feelings. She and Shannon engage in underage drinking with each other on the phone for New Year's Eve, and Byron date-rapes a girl while blacked out from alcohol when she is also under the influence. It is worth noting that characters in the book only use strong language when extremely angry, Virginia included. Also, although underage drinking is presented as a part of normal teenage experimentation, the date rape scene indicates the dangers of overdoing it. For that matter, even Virginia's father, who is of legal drinking age, tries to scale down his drinking when he realizes he has been self-medicating over his son's situation. Overall, this book not only lets characters make poor decisions, but also lets them learn and grow from their mistakes. For these reasons, as well as the fact that the book touches on important issues for teenage girls, I would argue that it should be, and needs to be, available in libraries.

Why I Chose This Book: I found the author's treatment of a number of difficult subjects beautifully and sensitively done, and found her heroine funny, sympathetic and compelling. Many young adult authors, especially male ones, do not realize how much more difficult it is to be an overweight girl than an overweight boy in contemporary society. Mackler shows the reader that although society may not change its attitudes, it is possible to change how one deals with society and views oneself. This book will appeal to anyone who has struggled with issues of self-esteem, body image, or feeling like a social misfit: in other words, anyone who is, has been, or ever will be a teenage girl.