Looks
Meghan Ball is both the most visible and the most invisible person in school. Her massive size is impossible to ignore, yet people freely spill their secrets in front of her, perhaps because they think she isn't listening. But she is. Now her attention has turned to a new girl: Aimee Zorn, with her stick-figure body and defiant attitude. Meghan is determined to befriend Aimee, and when she ultimately succeeds, the two join forces to take down their shared enemy.
LOOKS is a 2008 Booklist Top Ten First Novels for Youth selection, and a 2009 ALA Best Book for Young Adults.
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From Kirkus Reviews, starred review:
Even though Meghan is fat and Aimee is thin, they have a lot in common: Both use food to cauterize pain and both feel deeply wronged by the same girl. Together, they seek revenge. Meghan's not just fat-she's vast, enormous. Silently, she navigates Valley High's hallways like an unreadable ocean liner. In contrast, Aimee darts from class to class, flinty, fierce and guarded. She's hound-dog skinny, with sharp bones protruding at her shoulders and knees. George extracts adolescent fears and coping mechanisms with surgical precision. Her startling emotional and physical portraits leave readers captivated. Teens will instantly understand why Meghan and Aimee seek invisibility: When unseen, one's far less likely to be hurt or exposed. Readers living with eating disorders will find unflinching accounts of binges and starvation as well. Luminous language places teens inside Meghan's and Aimee's struggling minds and bodies. (Fiction. 14 & up)
From Children's Literature:
LOOKS is a rarity in the field of young adult fiction. It offers up two enormously flawed female characters with painful issues but does not tie the story up neatly with healing and redemption. Meghan is obese, withdrawn, and angry. She is the elephant in the room that everyone talks about. Aimee is her physical opposite, a skinny, but also angry teen. Meghan becomes obsessed with her anorexic counterpart while Aimee becomes repulsed. Through a series of strange events, they become friends when they realize they have a common enemy. What makes this story stand out is that it is truly about the friendship of the girls, not the unhealthy relationship with food they have in common. When it ends, neither girl is any less damaged, but each is happier in the new friendship that has formed. LOOKS is one of the few books that does not seek to cure or explain but rather to present the facts. One is too thin, one is too fat, but the differences in their looks are beside the point because what matters in this story is what they have in common. (Reviewer: Jennifer Waldrop)
Pearl's Picks, by Nancy Pearl:
In LOOKS, author Madeleine George does an outstanding job of capturing the emotional pain that sometimes seems inherent in adolescence. Her novel brought that time back so vividly for me that I frequently found it a little painful to read (and I mean that as a compliment to the author's skill). Do you remember how concerned everyone was with appearances, and how the worst thing you could do was to look, or act—or, worse, be—different from everyone else? The two main characters in George's debut novel seem, at first, to have nothing in common with either one another or the rest of their classmates. Sophomore Meghan Ball is grossly overweight. She tries to protect herself from being the butt of her classmates' jokes by making herself as invisible as possible, spending her time at school silently watching and listening from the sidelines. Freshman Aimee Zorn's survival strategy is extreme self-control. She's trained herself not to eat, and refuses to let herself feel upset that her mother's live-in boyfriend, a professor of poetry, has moved out of their house. She channels all her hunger—for love, for food, for acceptance—into writing poems. When Aimee is betrayed by the seemingly supremely perfect and popular Cara, Meghan's childhood best friend, it is Meghan who finds the perfect revenge, one which will also go a long way toward taking the school's best athlete, J-Bar (the ringleader of the group of Meghan's worst tormentors), down a peg or two from his smug stardom. This would be an especially good choice for a mother/daughter book group.
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