Imagine a world where big really is beautiful, where everyone aspires to be heavy and where people respond to "I just lost weight" with "That's too bad."
In this world, women's magazines run stories on "How to exercise for health without losing weight," the girl in the shampoo commercial has a double chin, and flight attendants have a minimum weight requirement.
In Andrea Rains Waggner's novel Alternate Beauty, this is the world in which plus size Ronnie Tremayne wakes up the morning (after a night of binge-eating Doritos and peanut butter) to a different world. In our world, Ronnie is a struggling fashion designer whose size prevents her from being taken seriously. Her slender, socialite mother mocks her, most men ignore her, and her boss tells her she will lose her job at the plus-size boutique if Ronnie does not lose weight.
In the new world, everything changes. Ronnie discovers that her corpulence is a sizable asset, both in the workplace and in her private life. Suddenly she gains the acceptance of her mother, has a hot new boyfriend, and, most importantly, gets a chance to create a clothing line based on her designs.
Ronnie is a likeable, if not particularly memorable heroine, and it's nice to see her get the success she deserves. But the most fun part of the novel is seeing the finely drawn world where Ronnie finds herself.
Details like women dieting to fit into larger sizes and obese cast members on Baywatch draw the reader further into the alternate world and are so much fun to read that one wishes the author had included more of them.
And while Waggner's focus seems to be to recount Ronnie's personal journey rather than to impart any overt political message, her book
does force readers to reexamine the prejudices that prevail in our own world. After all, it's no secret that weight is a rather, well, weighty issue for many Americans. Cover stories focusing on the changing sizes of celebrities such as Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan, and Kirstie Alley, seem to be a recent staple of People and US Weekly. There has been a recent explosion of books such as Judith Moore's memoir Fat Girl and I'm Not the New Me, Wendy McClure's collection of short stories based on her weight loss blog, "Poundy."
By showing us a world where the standards of beauty are reversed, Waggner brings a fresh voice to the subject and also reveals how much people are judged by their weight in our own world. Things that are commonplace in the alternate world?a 300-pound Bond girl, for example?but would be unthinkable in our own, also draw attention to how narrow, both figuratively and literally, the prevailing perception of attractiveness has become.
In addition, the lengths?such as hiring eating coaches or being so overweight that their health is endangered?show how ridiculous similar practices are in our reality.
Ronnie discovers many of these truths herself when her new life in the alternate world gives her an appetite for more than just food. But as her cravings subside, Ronnie discovers to her chagrin that her new opportunities are shrinking as quickly as her waistline.
All in all, Waggner's Alternate Beauty blends together a mix of physics, fashion, and romance to give the readers food for thought and show them a world where beauty really is relative.