cover image Fatropolis

Fatropolis

Tracey L. Thompson. Pearlsong (www.pearlsong.com), $18.95 trade paper (308p) ISBN 978-1-59719-058-9

When trying on dresses in Bountiful Britches, a plus-size specialty store, lonely, insecure Jenny Crandell inadvertently falls through an interdimensional portal into Fatropolis, a speciously constructed alternate version of New York City that worships fatness instead of thinness. Jenny uncovers secrets about the different dimensions that strain the reader’s suspension of belief while engaging in a tepid, clichéd love triangle. She slowly learns to love herself and appreciate big bodies—though of course her love interests—Argus Lippencott, a “tall and gorgeous” health food store clerk “with rock hard muscles,” and interdimensional refugee Leland O’Flannigan—are conventionally handsome by New York standards and far too skinny for Fatropolis. Stilted dialogue, shallow world-building, an illogical and meandering plot, and threadbare characters serve as little more than vessels for the author’s message, which is too often undermined by the book’s own superficiality and obsession with thinness. (Nov.)