Big Fat Disaster

Despair comes in all sizes. So does hope. Colby, insecure, shy, and way overweight, hates the limelight as much as her pageant-pretty mom and sisters love it. But Dad's a hero, running for office on a family-values platform. Suddenly, he ditches his marriage for a younger woman and gets caught stealing money from the campaign. Everyone hates Colby for finding out and telling the truth. From a mansion, they end up in a poor relative's trailer, where her mother's contempt swells right along with Colby's supersized jeans. Then, a cruel video of Colby half-dressed, made by her cousin Ryan, gets on the internet. Colby plans her own death, but Ryan steps in, and is mortally hurt. In the aftermath, Colby, hailed as a hero, knows she's a fraud. Threatened with exposure, Colby must face the truth about her selfish mother, and her own shame. Harrowing and hopeful, proof that proves that heroism can come with a fierce and terrible price, 'Big Fat Disaster' is that rare thing, a story that is authentically new. AUTHOR: A long time English teacher, speaker, blogger, and advocate for abuse survivors, Beth Fehlbaum is the author the Patience trilogy, a 2011 YALSA Reluctant Readers pick. 'Big Fat Disaster' grew out of her students' struggles with eating disorders, as well as her own. Visit her on the web at www .bethfehlbaumya .com and the Merit Press Facebook page. SELLING POINTS: Colby is the Big Fat Disaster in her own life. Dad's a popular politician, Mum a former Miss Texas, sister picture-perfect, Colby just a fat misfit. This is no fat-girl-gets-thin story, however, but tells of another kind of personal transformation, in which the victim of disdain and bullying has to face her own role in her misery Intensely contemporary, recalling Wally Lamb's 'She's Come Undone', Big Fat Disaster is a complex story of a child abandoned by her parents, who decides to risk saving herself when no one else will This story also proves that even kids so bitter and friendless they want to end their lives can find the will to fight through it. Any teen who's been tagged a loser, by her own family as well as her peers, will identify, as well as anyone who cares