This book was a thinker and I enjoyed it very much. It’s a story of two halves, the first half being a poorly run government scheme that gives obese people with a BMI of over 30 two options: pay your own private health care or voluntarily enter a weight-loss centre until your BMI is below 30. The system is flawed and people rarely lose the weight needed to leave, and if they do – they’re back before you know it.

The second half of this book is what would happen if the scheme was sold to a major corporation who would then seek to make money out of the overweight people? Bad things. Lots of bad things.

The book is funny and cleverly written so it never gets the opportunity to get too depressing, though it comes close a few times. It looks at the way people view and treat overweight people, how easy it is to dehumanise any group of people if you’re ‘helping them help themselves’ and generally how trying to control other people’s weight is a minefield of complications.

Keelan is the main character, he’s a very thoughtful and funny man who has found himself stuck in the system. As a connoisseur of cake, I find it very easy to empathise with him and his battle with his weight –knowing that you need to change your eating habits doesn’t make it any easier to do. He wants to be free to lead his normal life again but instead he’s being forced on weird diets by people who don’t know what they’re talking about and denied personal dignity.

The chapters alternate between the story and a funny representation of some of the facts and ‘alternative’ facts about dieting and weight loss. The science is constantly changing and is rarely as simple as you expect it to be.

The Fatness means a lot to me and while entertaining, it did hit a lot of nerves about health and how it’s acceptable to shame people about their weight in order to make money from their desire to change.

About the Author

Human-shaped, simian-obsessed, robot-fighting, pirate-hearted, story-telling junkie, Mark A. Rayner is an award-winning writer of satirical & speculative fiction.

By day he is a university prof and by night, a writer of satirical novels, short stories, squibs and other drivel. (Some pure, and some quite tainted with meaning.) His 2012 novel, The Fridgularity, won an Indie Reader Discovery Award for best humor.