Episode 10-04: A romance with a fat lead - Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange

Welcome to Reading With Libraries!

Thank you for joining us again on our book group and Reader’s advisory podcast!

We are here to talk about books and share library ideas!

This season we are exploring all new ideas for books and book suggestions, so you can expand your reading horizons, and share more information with your library community. We are looking at prompts from the 2023 PopSugar reading challenge this season. You can read along with their challenge, linked in our show notes, or just enjoy some different books.

We have so many books to enjoy this week! There are so many good developments happening with romance books; adding in fat characters make them more like real life and let many of us see ourselves in these stories.

Check out our show notes page for links to our beverages, our resources, and the books we share today.

Beverages:

This is, of course, a book group. And every book group needs to have beverages, so you really get the feel for your reading!

This week’s beverages, and several more, are found in the article “The 16 Best Valentine’s Day Drinks That Give a Nice Nod to Romance”

Rosita

A more complex cousin of the Negroni, the Rosita is an intoxicating blend of tequila, two kinds of vermouth, bright red and bittersweet Campari, and a dash of bitters.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 oz. tequila reposado

• 1/2 oz. sweet vermouth

• 1/2 oz. dry vermouth

• 1/2 oz. Campari

• 1 dash Angostura bitters

Directions

1. Stir ingredients with cracked ice in a mixing tin until chilled.

2. Strain into an Old Fashioned glass over cubed ice. Garnish with an orange (or lemon) twist.

Pink Lady Cocktail

Frothy and fresh, the Pink Lady cocktail is a sweet treat packed with flavor.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 oz. gin

• 1/2 oz. apple brandy

• 1/2 oz. fresh lemon juice

• 1/2 oz. grenadine

• 1/4 – 1/2 oz. egg white

Directions

1. Add all ingredients into cocktail shaker, seal your shaker, and shake vigorously for 5 seconds. Add ice and shake again for another 5 seconds.

2. Fine strain into a cocktail class and garnish with a brandied cherry.

Genre Discussion:

This is an emerging genre in romance, and a welcome one! In this genre, “fat” is not code for a bad person or for someone who is miserably hanging around the main character who is skinny. As most adults in the US now can be identified as fat or overweight, books about people who just happily live their lives – and even manage to add in friendship and romance are representative of real people. The focus is not on being sad at not living life as a size two, or trying to lose weight. They don’t need people with misplaced “sympathy” telling them they are concerned about health. They don’t need to feel badly about their clothing sizes. No need to dance around the label, trying to pretend fat people do not exist. These characters do not need this level of pity. They are busy enjoying their lives, complete with the full mix of issues and pitfalls common to all romance books.

As with all of the romance genre, there are so many different ways to tell these stories and so many different kinds of stories. Romance is embracing the diversity of life and of real people, and it is making the genre stronger and more interesting for everyone to enjoy!

Suggested Reading Resources:

Our Book Discussion

We have our beverages, we are familiar with this week’s genre, let’s get to the book discussion! We will give you a list of all the books we share today. In this week’s show notes, you can click on any title to get more information; the link will take you to Minnesota’s Red Balloon independent bookstore. Browse around while you are there, and maybe you will find something else you enjoy! (We also link to Goodreads)

My Big Fat Bloodsucker Wedding, by Bella Jacobs

It’s all fun and games…until you stake your sister’s fiancé.

Okay, fine! I’m not really going to stake Colin or his brother, the insufferable, bossy-fanged Darcy Blackmore. At least not as long as I can find another way to stop our siblings from getting hitched.

My sister, Lizzy, won’t admit it, but she doesn’t love Colin. She’s sacrificing herself so we can stay in Nightfall, New Hampshire, and renew the magical shield keeping the paranormal creatures here, including witches like us, safe from human discovery.

I have ten days to find another way—aside from a bloodsucker wedding—to secure our legacy and not a lead in sight. So, imagine my surprise when the wretched, though admittedly smoking hot, Darcy comes to the rescue.

His scheme?

We pretend to be hot for each other, trick Lizzy and Colin into confessing they don’t really want to tie the knot, and sort out how to save the town once the wedding bells are silenced—permanently.

It’s not a bad plan. In theory.

If only Darcy wasn’t every bit as delicious as he is obnoxious. If only he’d kept his secret sweet side under wraps and kissing him wasn’t the most amazing thing to happen to my lips in my entire life. If only this fake love had stayed fake, instead of creeping into my heart on stealthy little vampire feet.

Now I have a decision to make—keep faking it with the world’s sexiest vampire until I lose big at love, yet again, or leave my new hometown and all the people I’m coming to love behind. Forever.

Under the Whispering Door, by TJ Klune

The tea is hot, the scones are fresh, and the dead are just passing through.

When a reaper comes to collect Wallace from his own funeral, Wallace begins to suspect he might be dead.

And when Hugo, the owner of a peculiar tea shop, promises to help him cross over, Wallace decides he’s definitely dead.

But even in death he’s not ready to abandon the life he barely lived, so when Wallace is given one week to cross over, he sets about living a lifetime in seven days.

Hilarious, haunting, and kind, Under the Whispering Door is an uplifting story about a life spent at the office and a death spent building a home.

Fat Chance, Charlie Vega

Coming of age as a Fat brown girl in a white Connecticut suburb is hard. Harder when your whole life is on fire, though.

Charlie Vega is a lot of things. Smart. Funny. Artistic. Ambitious. Fat.

People sometimes have a problem with that last one. Especially her mom. Charlie wants a good relationship with her body, but it’s hard, and her mom leaving a billion weight loss shakes on her dresser doesn’t help. The world and everyone in it have ideas about what she should look like: thinner, lighter, slimmer-faced, straighter-haired. Be smaller. Be whiter. Be quieter.

But there’s one person who’s always in Charlie’s corner: her best friend Amelia. Slim. Popular. Athletic. Totally dope. So when Charlie starts a tentative relationship with cute classmate Brian, the first worthwhile guy to notice her, everything is perfect until she learns one thing–he asked Amelia out first. So is she his second choice or what? Does he even really see her?

Because it’s time people did.

A sensitive, funny, and painfully honest coming-of-age story with a wry voice and tons of chisme (gossip), Fat Chance, Charlie Vega tackles our relationships to our parents, our bodies, our cultures, and ourselves.

Manhunt, by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Beth and Fran spend their days traveling the ravaged New England coast, hunting feral men and harvesting their organs in a gruesome effort to ensure they’ll never face the same fate.

Robbie lives by his gun and one hard-learned motto: other people aren’t safe.

After a brutal accident entwines the three of them, this found family of survivors must navigate murderous TERFs, a sociopathic billionaire bunker brat, and awkward relationship dynamics—all while outrunning packs of feral men, and their own demons.

Nothing Is Okay, by Rachel Wiley

Nothing is Okay is the second full-length poetry collection by Rachel Wiley, whose work simultaneously deconstructs the lies that we were taught about our bodies and our beings, and builds new ways of viewing ourselves. As she delves into queerness, feminism, fatness, dating, and race, Wiley molds these topics into a punching critique of culture and a celebration of self. A fat positive activist, Wiley’s work soars and challenges the bounds of bodies and hearts, and the ways we carry them.

Faith: Taking Flight by Julie Murphy

From Julie Murphy, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dumplin’, comes the first in a two-book origin story of Faith, a groundbreaking, plus-sized superhero from the Valiant Entertainment comics.

Faith Herbert is a pretty regular teen. When she’s not hanging out with her two best friends, Matt and Ches, she’s volunteering at the local animal shelter or obsessing over the long-running teen drama The Grove.

So far, her senior year has been spent trying to sort out her feelings for her maybe-crush Johnny and making plans to stay close to Grandma Lou after graduation. Of course, there’s also that small matter of recently discovering she can fly….

When the fictional world of The Grove crashes into Faith’s reality as the show relocates to her town, she can’t believe it when TV heroine Dakota Ash takes a romantic interest in her.

But her fandom-fueled daydreams aren’t enough to distract Faith from the fact that first animals, then people, have begun to vanish from the town. Only Faith seems able to connect the dots to a new designer drug infiltrating her high school.

But when her investigation puts the people she loves in danger, she will have to confront her hidden past and use her newfound gifts—risking everything to save her friends and beloved town.

Plus don’t miss the follow-up, Faith: Greater Heights!

(and the author is a former librarian!)

Untouchable , by Talia Hibbert

Sleeping with the staff wasn’t part of the plan.

Sensible, capable, and ruthlessly efficient, Hannah Kabbah is the perfect nanny… until a colossal mistake destroys her career and shatters her reputation. These days, no-one in town will hire her–except Nathaniel Davis, a brooding widower with a smile like sin and two kids he can’t handle.

Prim and proper Hannah is supposed to make Nate’s life easier, but the more time he spends around his live-in nanny, the more she makes things… hard. He can’t take advantage of her vulnerable position, but he can’t deny the truth, either: with every look, every smile, every midnight meeting, Nate’s untouchable employee is stealing his heart.

The trouble is, she doesn’t want to keep it. Forbidden love isn’t high on Hannah’s to-do list, and trust isn’t one of her strengths. When dark secrets threaten to destroy their bond, Nate’s forced to start playing dirty. Because this reformed bad boy will break every rule to finally claim his woman.

(Black and bi representation also!)

Get a Life, Chloe Brown, by Talia Hibbert

Chloe Brown is a chronically ill computer geek with a goal, a plan, and a list. After almost—but not quite—dying, she’s come up with seven directives to help her “Get a Life”, and she’s already completed the first: finally moving out of her glamorous family’s mansion. The next items?

Enjoy a drunken night out.
Ride a motorcycle.
Go camping.
Have meaningless but thoroughly enjoyable sex.
Travel the world with nothing but hand luggage.
And… do something bad.

But it’s not easy being bad, even when you’ve written step-by-step guidelines on how to do it correctly. What Chloe needs is a teacher, and she knows just the man for the job.

Redford ‘Red’ Morgan is a handyman with tattoos, a motorcycle, and more sex appeal than ten-thousand Hollywood heartthrobs. He’s also an artist who paints at night and hides his work in the light of day, which Chloe knows because she spies on him occasionally. Just the teeniest, tiniest bit.

But when she enlists Red in her mission to rebel, she learns things about him that no spy session could teach her. Like why he clearly resents Chloe’s wealthy background. And why he never shows his art to anyone. And what really lies beneath his rough exterior…

The Weight of It All, by N.R. Walker

After being dumped by his long-term boyfriend for being overweight, Henry Beckett decides to make some drastic changes. In a vain attempt at getting his boyfriend back, Henry does the most absurdly frightening thing he can think of.

He joins a gym.

Reed Henske is a personal trainer who isn’t sure he’ll ever be ready to date again. He’s sick of guys who are only interested in the perfect body image, never seeing him for who he really is.

As Reed tortures Henry with things like diet and exercise, Henry enamours Reed with recipes and laughter. As the friendship lines start to blur, Henry is convinced there’s no way Thor-like Reed could ever be interested in a guy like him.

Reed just has to convince Henry that life isn’t about reaching your ideal bodyweight. It’s about finding your perfect counterweight.

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us on Reading With Libraries! Join us next Thursday with another topic or genre and many more books to share and discuss. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a single episode!

And if you want to hear more about the work we do in libraries or expand your library skills, check out our podcast Linking Our Libraries! Right now that is dropping short episodes with a few book suggestions; so subscribe to get that every Tuesday.

Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!