Nice Girls Endure

Gr 8 Up—Chelsea Duvay loves singing and dreams of opening her own shoe store someday. But first she must endure the daily nightmare of high school, where no one sees past Chelsea's weight. She manages to, as the title implies, endure these indignities and ridicule from all sides. She even begins a tentative friendship with a classmate during their work on a project. Then Chelsea is attacked by the popular boys in her class. They share humiliating photos of her online, but instead of being pushed to the edge, the protagonist reaches inside herself to find her voice and go on. While Struyk-Bonn makes the smart choice not to tie Chelsea's empowerment to a hokey plot about weight loss, she still spends much of the novel detailing the teen's mockery and suffering. This doesn't really advance the narrative, and Struyk-Bonn's short, declarative sentences make the narrative feel more clinical than empathetic. This technique also seems intended to engage struggling readers, but instead, it fails to fully develop the characters and thus makes it hard to care about them. Even Chelsea's supposed strength in the face of her abuse ends up reading more like an unrealistic flat affect than an endearing character trait. This protagonist deserves more than endless abuse and humiliation with a small sliver of hinted-at happiness at the end.