Dietland - Sarai Walker

Dietland by Sarai Walker Edition: Hardcover Price: $19.26

The diet revolution is here. And it’s armed.
Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed, because when you’re fat, to be noticed is to be judged. Or mocked. Or worse. With her job answering fan mail for a popular teen girls’ magazine, she is biding her time until her weight-loss surgery. Only then can her true life as a thin person finally begin.
Then, when a mysterious woman starts following her, Plum finds herself falling down a rabbit hole and into an underground community of women who live life on their own terms. There Plum agrees to a series of challenges that force her to deal with her past, her doubts, and the real costs of becoming “beautiful.” At the same time, a dangerous guerrilla group called “Jennifer” begins to terrorize a world that mistreats women, and as Plum grapples with her personal struggles, she becomes entangled in a sinister plot. The consequences are explosive.
Dietland is a bold, original, and funny debut novel that takes on the beauty industry, gender inequality, and our weight loss obsession—from the inside out, and with fists flying.

 Bleak yet Mesmerizing and Thought Provoking

This novel is as I said in the title, a bleak but mesmerizing look into feminism, the weight loss industry and one woman’s dissatisfaction with her rotund body.  To top it off there is a fascinating and mysterious side story about a group called Jennifer who are in the business of revenge and avenging mistreated and exploited women around the world.

This is not a frothy story with a typical happily-ever-after; this is the real deal –alternately depressing and eye-opening.  This novel is written in a rather unique style, more like and auto-biography than a fictional novel.  The characters are well fleshed 9no pun intended) and mostly depressing or down-right dislikable,   at times that will include the main character Plum AKA Alicia.  Plum will run the gamut from a whiney, overly self-involved egotist.  I can sympathize with her at times because I too am a fat woman, but only at times.  Sometimes I just want to smack her hard with a turkey  and wake her up out of the dream that dieting ( if skinny is all she really wants) is going to be a piece of cake –that a program will do it for her, that she doesn’t need to change, that dieting is easy.  Other times I want to laugh with her.

Some of this book just doesn’t seem as if it really needed to be included.

It may take you a while to get into this book; it took me quite a few chapters to do so. Sometimes while reading this, I would think that I should be scouring my toilets instead of reading this (I thought I might not be able to finish this book) so I wouldn’t be forced to continue reading it then there are many moments later on where I don’t think I could have put it down even if my hair had been on fire.

The ending is a bit predictable.