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The book is written by Marylin Sachs. The centre of attention is a boy named Jeff and Ellen, the fat girl. Jaff is a good looking seventeen-year-old boy. He lives in a house with his mother and his sister. His parents are divorced. His father is married again and has two new sons. Jeff is not very happy with his family circumstances but he always has a girlfriend and when he meets his girlfriend, he is very happy. Ellen is "The Fat Girl\". She is overweight and shy.
The story:
One day Jeff meets a girl named Norma. She is a good-looking and slim girl. He goes to the same ceramics class as he goes. He starts talking to her and they fall in love. Jeff is very happy with Norma and they have a lot of fun together. In the ceramics class there is also a fat girl. When she came in the first time, Jeff began to laugh when he saw her the first time. The girl began to cry and started watching him. Jeff is not very happy about the fat girl and his girlfriend tells him that the fat girl is Ellen DeLuca. She has rich parents and she is the only fat person in the family. Her parents are slim and her two brothers are slim too. The family is not very happy about the fat daughter and they are ashamed of her.
Ellen has no friends at school and everybody laughs about her and Jeff does too. But the fat girl always looks at him. One day he tells her not to watch him any more but she doesn't care. She always is a little late and one day Jeff says to his girlfriend that the pots of Ellen are ugly. But Ellen hears it and runs away. Jeff doesn't know what to do and so he follows her. Now Jeff realise what he did and he decides to be friendly to the fat girl and he goes home with her.
Ellen doesn't know how to react but after a time they were good friends. In the Christmas-holidays he always was at Ellen's place. His girlfriend Norma was skiing with her family and Jeff began to make a new person of Ellen. But that was not easy. She has only old clothes and a bad hairstyle. Jeff begins to change her and she began to lose weight. Jeff falls in love with Ellen.
But Jeff has many problems at home. His sister wants to move to his father's place and his mother is very sad about that. Jeff told his sister not to tell his mother before Christmas. But after Christmas his sister went to his father and he and his mother were very sad. Ellen is very important for him at that time because she is his Ellen and he wants to make a new individual of her. And she wants too. They bought new clothes for her, she got a new hairstyle and cosmetics. Jeff was very happy about his Ellen but one day he noticed that Ellen wasn't "his\" Ellen any more. She had her own personality and she began to go her own way.
One evening, when he wanted to go to a party with her she said that she wanted to go to the cinema with friends and Jeff told her that she is a girl like all others now. He didn't loved her since than.
He was a bit sad because he thought that they could be friends but instead of thank him she didn't talk to him any more. His mother told him that that is live and she has the same problems with her daughter.
I like the story because it is true. People don't know what others do for them and the others are sad or angry then. Jeff helps the fat girl and when she didn't need him any more she showed it to him. But the book also shows that everyone can change his personality. This is very important. The fat girl has to change completely but everyone of us can change a little bit. Maybe he needs help but it is possible. You just can do it now! Also the problems with children of divorced parents are described very well. The mother has problems and the daughter goes to her father who has a new family. But that makes only more problems because the mother is angry at her daughter and her ex-husband. I think they should have talked about the problem - the whole family. But they don't talk to each other and that makes new problems.
The book was not difficult to read. There were some difficult words I had to look up in the dictionary but it was no problem to understand the text. I didn't thought it would be so easy. Maybe I will read more English books in the future.
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