Charlie Vega wants a healthy relationship with her body. She discovers the fat acceptance movement and learns to accept her body, but it becomes problematic when her mom shoves her one weight-loss shake after the other. All Charlie wants is to be more like the beautiful, brown, and fat characters she writes in her stories, but she must learn to believe it in herself.
The one character that I deeply related to on a cellular level would be Charlie Vega. The confidence she lacked throughout the story to truly see the beauty within herself was what I lacked. My high school experience was in the moment of pop culture when body shaming was the norm, and the weight gain of Britney Spears made headline news. I could relate and still struggle with Charlie’s intense need to receive validation from others instead of validating herself. Charlie has a crippling tendency to compare herself to other people. I love how Charlie finds the inner feminist voice inside herself and realizes that being the fat, beautiful, ambitious, and talented Charlie Vega is everything! If Charlie and I were to spend one day together, we would stock up on all the Latinx YA books and co-write some steamy fan-fic together.