Overview
Lara Ardeche has always been on top of things. With a winning attitude, and supporting family, there’s not much Lara has been unable to accomplish. She has won many beauty pageants, scored a wonderful boyfriend, and was even voted homecoming queen over two very prominent opponents. Lara Ardeche is the girl we all want to hate, but secretly wish we were. She’s got everything going for her, but is really because of her confidence or her waist line? After she starts gaining inches on a weekly basis, Lara’s life is turned upside down.
Review
Life in the Fat Lane is the first book I’ve read by Cherie Bennett and I have to say it was a good one. Cherie places the reader in such a situation in which you are able to experience being fat in a “thin is in” society. This was one of those rare page turners. I was hooked on the plot before I know it. As Lara goes from 118 to 218 pounds in just about a year’s time, she gains more than just a larger waist line.
At the beginning of her weight gaining, Lara is still her confident, pageant winning self, reassuring herself that it’s only a matter of time till she gets her figure back. But every time she steps on the scale, unlike her weight, a part of her self esteem is lost. How is it possible that she keeps gaining, no matter the countless diets and excessive exercise she’s put herself though? In just a few months, Lara has lost all hope she had of ever losing the weight. No matter what she does, there’s no tipping the scales in her favor. Like that isn’t problematic enough, her home life also starts to fall apart. Her mom and dad lose confident in her and in each other. Soon enough, her mom packs up their bags and them moves away.
This move was the best thing her mom ever did for Lara, even though Lara hated her for it at first. At the new school, Lara begins to find out who she really is and starts to accept her weight gain and puts the whispers past her. She even gets back into doing something she loves, piano lessons, which shows that she’s beginning to love herself again. Her instructor, Suzanne, and best friend, Molly, really played a big part in her life. They helped her coop with the weight gain and stayed by her side through it all. Jett, her ex, even came back into her life.
Life in the Fat Lane was definitely unique and I enjoyed every page of it. The old saying, “It’s what’s on the inside that counts” explains this book inside out. It might have taken Lara and her superficial family a while, but they came to accept Lara for who she was, on the inside. I would recommend this book to readers all a like.
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