How I Got Skinny, Famous, and Fell Madly in Love

by Ken Baker

[Leah]

When I spotted How I Got Skinny, Famous and Fell Madly In Love on Netgalley, I thought it sounded right up my alley. A book about a fat person (ie. someone I can personally relate to) – check. A book about reality TV – check. And a family that’s crazier than the Kardashians (and I’m someone who doesn’t even watch the Kardashians) – check. See. Right up my alley, so I was really interested to dive into the novel and see if the great synopsis lived up to what was inside the cover, and it mostly did. In fact, the only thing I didn’t like (in fact, I HATED it) was the ending. I could see the ending creeping up on me on my Kindle and I just knew I was going to be stuck with some stupid non-resolved ending where nothing actually got settled or sorted, and so it turned out to be true. It frustrates me that authors put so much time and effort into all the other pages of the book and then skimp on the ending. Aren’t they aware that an ending can totally ruin a book?

How I Got Skinny, Famous and Fell Madly In Love very much takes all the bits from today’s media – the love of skinny people, the shaming of fat people, the world of reality TV and crams it all into one little book about the fantastic Emery Jackson. The world these days revolves around the lives of Z-list celebrities although I can’t fathom why – in America it’s the Kardashians, in the UK it’s the TOWIE and Made in Chelsea bunch. All famous for doing nothing in particular, but somehow it works and How I Got Skinny, Famous and Fell Madly In Love very much riffs off that paritcular subject and goes with it as Emery Jackson is asked to lose 50 lbs in 50 days. (I personally think that’s physically impossible to lose a lb a day unless you DIE, but hey, it’s fiction so I can go with it.) The good news, is though, I actually really liked Emery. She’s snarky, brutally honest, and doesn’t really care what anyone thinks of her and is only doing the stupid reality show to help her family. Until she starts losing the weight, and it suddenly becomes her main focus.

While I really loved Emery – I did, so much, I love head-strong, honest heroines and Emery’s one of the best 16-year-olds I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting, and she has such a great voice – I really struggled with the rest of her selfish, self-absorbed family. I wanted to bash them all on the head because the way they all act is AWFUL. If my Mam treated me the way Emery’s Mom treats her, I probably would have killed her by now and got away with it. She was worse than Kris Jenner, she was like Kris Jenner on Speed, which she sorta was! She made me cringe, I was just so embarrassed with the way she acted. There was a whole secret going on between Emery’s mom and the producer of the show Fifty Pounds To Freedom, Doc which I thought should have been revealed so much sooner than it was, just, at least, so we could see the after-effects it had. It all sort of happened much to quickly for my liking and it was really there that I felt the novel was weakest because it was all rushed as the ending was coming up.

Ken Baker is definitely a very talented writer, and very much got into the head of Emery Jackson very well. She was the shining star of the novel and she carried it very well, despite her mother and her over-bearing sister Angel trying to get their way into the picture whenever they could. I thought she was a very mature 16-year-old and I applaud the fact she was willing to put herself through so much hell just to help out her ungrateful, awful family. Because that’s what you do – no matter how awful your family are, you support them always, I suppose. How I Got Skinny, Famous and Fell Madly In Love was perhaps a slightly misleading title for the novel since all that stuff doesn’t happen right away, but it sums up the book nicely, and it was a very interesting look into reality TV, and just how far some people will go to make good (read: BAD) reality TV. It was very much a mash-up of all the things we find important nowadays and managed to translate it into a fantastic, enjoyable, hard-to-put-down read. I just wish with all my heart, that a bit more time was focused on the end of the novel because it was just a bit too rushed for my liking and a bit too lacking in details.