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Thinner Than Thou Kit Reed 9780765311955 Books

Download As PDF : Thinner Than Thou Kit Reed 9780765311955 Books

Thinner Than Thou Kit Reed 9780765311955 Books

Thinner Than Thou was one of my favorite books to read as a teenager because it's about a world that has been taken over by a cult of becoming thin and perfect. The ideas are good and still relevant but rereading now that I'm older, I noticed how bad the writing is.


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Thinner Than Thou Kit Reed 9780765311955 Books Reviews

I read Kit Reed's Thinner Then Thou and found it disappointing and totally unbelievable. It's set in the same kind of parody America as, say, The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas or Going South, with a tone of inyourface darkfuture recalling Stephenson's Snow Crash, but the whole idea is dated and faintly ridiculous, based loosely on Reed's "Fat Farm" in Other Stories And....The Attack of the Giant Baby. A boyfriend and twins set out to recover the twins' older sister, a bulimic sent off to the "dedicated sisters" convent for weight gain. A reviewer on missed that the twins were brother and sister, not "brothers"; in general, the reviewers seem to have missed how jejune and tired this satire in. The three siblings' mother eventually sets off after them. Meanwhile, a fat businessman joins the weightloss "cult" which has driven all other religions into hiding quite literally underground. He is humiliated, abused and tortured by the Reverend Earl, who is apparently powerful enough to set aside the Constitution and Bill of Rights as well as to sentence senior citizens to geronticide without a murmur of protest from the immense wealth and power that over-60 people command.

In the end, an army of dispossessed fatsos overthrow Earl and kill him, and then the family is reunited. Yay!

Sorry, this was just totally unbelievable. A weight loss guru overturning freedom of religion? An America where save for a few weirdos in caves,

no one believes in God or religion? In a future so close that they still use DVDs? A "reverend" who can have old people murdered? While they don't raise a godawful stink? In an America that remodeled every sidewalk because there are so many people in wheelchairs that vote? Danny's "sport" was no surprise, and neither were the "drug" formula, the evil of the "reverend", or the tired jabs at fat-hate. Does anyone still believe that religon is 'dying' in America? Anyone but a college English teacher with her head in her armpit? That no shock media would have found out the dirt on Reverend Earl long, long before he could "control the media"? That no one who knew his huge fat mama would have spoken out? That "fat police" could literally snatch kids from their homes and not give them back the minute that their parents screamed? That insurance companies would not control the treatment of fatsos as they now control the treatment of the mentally ill?? Why would an insurance company agree to the incarceration of fatsos in a twenty-story underground building? Or does Reverend Earl also control the insurance companies? How? Why would a twenty-story underground building have windows that open into dirt?

So much could have been done with this idea without going off the deep end with it, as she did. As satire this is not funny; as serious sf, it is totally impossible to believe.

Geoff Ryman's praise for the novel was a last straw in whatever esteem I might have had for him. I am appalled that he said what he did. This book just has very little to recommend it and I will not read her work again.
There, I just saved you 300+ pages of reading.

Maybe it's just that my expectations for "Thinner Than Thou" were so high, there had to be the inevitable backlash. I read the interior flap on this book and was so excited by the description, I greedily devoured it in a day or so. But I probably should have asked for a taster menu.

Okay, enough of the trying to be cute.

Reed has imagination and the skill to back it up. She creates interesting events with quirky characters to grab your attention and hold on tight. Her world-building has a wicked sense of humor; in a dystopia where Thin Is In, teenagers have competitive eating contests instead of drag races, and the televangelist isn't preaching God but a miracle diet complete with the heavenly Afterfat -- an existence where you eat all you want but never gain a pound.

Sound exciting? It is. And if you just look at these aspects, "Thinner" is a very amusing book that delights in poking holes in the mass-media culture that worships heroin chic and plastic-surgery poster girls. But it doesn't hold anything deeper, in terms of social commentary, than any thirteen-year-old girl knows from self-esteem books/articles/classes/after-school specials. And Reed's right -- you should love who you are, regardless of what you look like, and if anybody tries to say you're somehow wrong or disgraceful because of extra pounds you can give them a roundhouse kick with my blessing. But I still wouldn't reccomend this book.

In trying to prove her point with extremes of black and white, Reed wanders into dangerous grey areas. When did conditions like anorexia or morbid obesity become personal statements instead of health problems? Never. They never-ever did. But Reed refuses to address the diseases or dysfunctions that can result from, say, being too heavy to walk, or dropping below eighty pounds. (Reed even has an anorexic girl chowing down on a candy bar after days of starvation, followed by a donut. Do you know what could actually happen if she did that? She could go into a hypoglycemic COMA.) And neither are the girl's psychological problems (leading to her condition) dealt with -- it seems like, according to Reed, she's allowed to do whatever the heck she wants with her body, no matter how unhappy she really is.

And I'm sorry, but that turns my stomach. All of it. Yes, we're too concerned about image. But we're also woefully ignorant of how to make our bodies HAPPY, not just pretty, and Reed's book overlooks that concept entirely. Combine that with a rather lackluster narrative drive (she gives away all the good stuff in the beginning, and the rest rather drags on) and an ending with a shocking 'twist' you can see coming from a hundred pages back, and well...

It's a fun book. It's quirky, it's kooky, it likes to laugh at both itself and the world. But provoking social commentary it is not, and any insights it DOES give are inevitably flawed by Reed's glossing-over of inconvenient facts about basic health and well-being. So smile, but don't take it that seriously.
Thinner Than Thou was one of my favorite books to read as a teenager because it's about a world that has been taken over by a cult of becoming thin and perfect. The ideas are good and still relevant but rereading now that I'm older, I noticed how bad the writing is.