Fatso Jean, the Ice Cream Queen - Softcover

Grade 3-5-- Chubby nine-year-old Jean lives in a neighborhood where the children thrive on doing wheelies on their bicycles, performing backdives from the diving board, and deciding who belongs to the Hot Shots, the Normals, and the Nerds. Jeans considers herself a Nerd, since the only thing she does well is eat ice cream. Even though the other children call her Fatso Jean, the Ice-Cream Queen, she can't give it up. She does, however, turn the craving into a way to earn money to go to Fat Camp. In the process, she loses weight, makes friends, and gives her money to Jimmy, a young diver headed for the Special Olympics. While none of the children have much breadth or depth of character and the plot is simplistic at best, the underlying theme of everyone working together to help Jimmy reconciles the story nicely at the end. Easy, palatable fiction for recreational reading. --Pamela K. Bomboy, Chesterfield County Public Schools, VA
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Jean, an overweight, incessantly self-deprecating nine-year-old, consoles her unhappy self by eating large quantities of ice cream. The taunts of the cool neighborhood kids (whom she calls the Mean Team) finally get to her, and Jean reduces her ice-cream consumption in order to lose weight--with some success, but with no luck toward becoming one of the gang. Still obsessed with her favorite food, she decides to go into the ice cream-making business. Without her parents' knowledge, Jean sells her product out of a wagon stenciled with the words: "Fatso Jean, the Ice Cream Queen," inexplicably using the epithet the Mean Team torments her with. In a final, rather unbelievable stroke of bad luck, Jean is inadvertently knocked down by the Mean Team on bikes, and the poor girl ends up in the hospital with a broken arm. After this, things begin to look up for Jean, and her tedious story ends on a happy note. Ages 7-11.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.