Sugar By: Deirdre Riordan Hall

Description:

I’m the fat Puerto Rican–Polish girl who doesn’t feel like she belongs in her skin, or anywhere else for that matter. I’ve always been too much and yet not enough.

Sugar Legowski-Gracia wasn’t always fat, but fat is what she is now at age seventeen. Not as fat as her mama, who is so big she hasn’t gotten out of bed in months. Not as heavy as her brother, Skunk, who has more meanness in him than fat, which is saying something. But she’s large enough to be the object of ridicule wherever she is: at the grocery store, walking down the street, at school. Sugar’s life is dictated by taking care of Mama in their run-down home—cooking, shopping, and, well, eating. A lot of eating, which Sugar hates as much as she loves.

When Sugar meets Even (not Evan—his nearly illiterate father misspelled his name on the birth certificate), she has the new experience of someone seeing her and not her body. As their unlikely friendship builds, Sugar allows herself to think about the future for the first time, a future not weighed down by her body or her mother.

Soon Sugar will have to decide whether to become the girl that Even helps her see within herself or to sink into the darkness of the skin-deep role her family and her life have created for her.

Date Started: Dec. 21, 2016
Date Completed: Jan. 3, 2017
Rating:★★★★

Characters:

     From the very beginning I immediately felt sorry for Sugar's situation; I just wanted to reach in and give her a hug and show her she is perfect the way she is and that she doesn't have to be skinny to have a good life and have real friends. I got a little flash of "My 600lb Life" from reading about her mother and absolutely resented her for basically forcing her kids to be how they are. Skunk is just a sad excuse for a brother. I understand siblings teasing each other because we've all done it, but he takes it entirely too far and not to mention he has no room to call any names. I think the way Sugar and Even met is the most cliche and cheesy way to meet a love interest and I was not at all impressed with how it was introduced. I don't like the "insta-friendship" and "insta-love" between Sugar and Even I wish they would have had to actually work for it a little harder.

Plot & Overall:

     Sugar's struggle with binge eating and then feeling bad for it afterwards is definitely real life relatable. I felt bad that she had no support system at home what so ever because her immediate family, all except her eldest  brother Henry, downed her just as much  as everyone else in town did. Her incredible talent and personality went unnoticed because of her weight problem. I was not ready for the amount of abuse tied in this book but it was very much appreciated. I thought I was just going to be dealing with emotional and mental abuse but how Deirdre went about adding the physical abuse into the plot was done very well and not in the expected way.
     
     I think this is a good book for schools to include in their assigned reading just because it hits on the bullying topic so well and it shows you don't have to be bullied just at school by strangers, but it can happen at home by your closest family members, as well. A lot of people could relate to this book and it doesn't have to pertain just to an individual with a weight problem. This was a very motivational and surprisingly emotional book that I would recommend to everyone especially people still in school that may be dealing with bullies and don't know how to handle the situation.