Scratch this nag from your race card. This one is a glorious, utterly hilarious ride until the last lengths, when the book breaks down into hokey melodrama. Cannie Shapiro is a bright, ambitious and hardworking newspaper reporter in Philadelphia. Most of all, there is Cannie's weight. Although she exercises, Cannie is big.
Every single note is perfection in the book's beginning.
The angry fat women at the Eating Disorders Center. The bitter old crone newspaper co-worker. The perfect rendering of Cannie's neighborhood growing up and the effect divorce has on lawn care. The ex-boyfriend Bruce and his really nice Jewish parents who, if they have a parental fault, have simply loved Bruce into a certain torpor. Even Dr. Shapiro's misery with wife and children is captured and conveyed.