Fat Angie
Homecoming
- 2021 INDIES Winner
- Bronze, Young Adult Fiction (Children's)
Fat Angie: Homecoming is the latest installment of e.E. Charlton-Trujillo’s award-winning series. In it, Angie is ready to ask Jamboree to be her girlfriend—until her first love, KC, moves back to town. As if that weren’t enough, a video of her singing goes viral, making her a kind of internet sensation. When she learns about an online music competition, Angie decides to form a band and compete.
Meanwhile, tensions at home keep building. Angie’s mother is still drinking and is verbally abusive—and is trying to deal with the death of Angie’s sister. Angie’s mostly absent father does all the wrong things. In this mire, Angie is not sure what to do about Jamboree and KC; she’s just trying to figure out her day-to-day life. Whether she can pull it all together to win the competition is in question.
The characters are diverse and realistic, and their conversations are a star of the book, both propulsive and straightforward. Angie’s running internal dialogue has the same quality. And though the novel starts off as a story about Angie’s love life and viral video, it fast evolves into something much deeper. Its multiple threads—Angie’s relationship with her mother; the family’s grief over Angie’s sister; the family’s avoidance of their feelings; Angie’s relationships with KC and Jamboree; Angie’s work toward self-acceptance, including where her body is concerned; and Angie’s absent father—are all significant enough to warrant their own novels. Their impacts on Angie loom. In this installment, many threads are fast resolved; some are never resolved, and so may seem superfluous.
The young adult novel Fat Angie: Homecoming is a celebration of friendship, love, and figuring out who you really are.
Reviewed by
Jaime Herndon
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
