Carla M. Lee

[books] (Fat) Fiction Friday: Karen Healey’s Guardian of the Dead

(Fat) Fiction Friday

For awhile now, I’ve been meaning to spend more time talking about the books I read. Specifically, I wanted to talk about books which include fat characters, though that won’t be my exclusive focus. Such is born (Fat) Fiction Friday, because the fat will come and go, but Fridays are forever. Or something like that. I like alliteration.

(You may be interested in an old blog post of mine talking about fat and feminism, Fat, Ugly, and Pissed, and Tammy Pierce’s response to it, So WHAT if we’re FAT? Which, for the record, that she read and responded to it brought me great joy. Tammy Pierce has been my favorite author almost my entire life and is one of my biggest feminist influences. I have a touch of hero worship for her.)

So on Fridays (though not necessarily all Fridays, as I head into the end of the semester, finals, graduation, and the bar exam) I will discuss fiction.

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(I wrote most of this the other day and intended to come back and add more before I posted today, but my allergies hit really hard and I’m almost out of Friday. Since this is (Fat) Fiction Friday, I want to get it posted before Friday ends, but if it’s scattered or confusing in places, I’m sorry.)

(Fat) Fiction Friday: Guardian of the Dead

It’s really kind of fitting that Guardian of the Dead is my first (Fat) Fiction Friday book. For one thing, it is Karen Healey’s first published novel and it was officially published on 1 April and it is the first novel by one of my close friends published by a major commercial publisher. For another, I first read this in first draft form, so rereading the official published version was a different experience. (A good experience, but different.) I reread books quite frequently (this is why I have both a large book collection and a teetering, towering To Read pile; the books I reread most make it into the collection, but there are quite a few of them, and so the To Read pile sometimes goes unread), but generally those are books which stay the same from one read to the next. Guardian of the Dead isn’t. (Or rather, wasn’t. From now on, it will stay the same. Which is perfectly fine with me, because I loved it and devoured it in just a few hours.)

Amazon Blurb: “You’re Ellie Spencer.”

I opened my mouth, just as he added, “And your eyes are opening.”

Seventeen-year-old Ellie Spencer is just like any other teenager at her boarding school. She hangs out with her best friend Kevin, she obsesses over Mark, a cute and mysterious bad boy, and her biggest worry is her paper deadline.

But then everything changes. The news headlines are all abuzz about a local string of serial killings that all share the same morbid trademark: the victims were discovered with their eyes missing. Then a beautiful yet eerie woman enters Ellie’s circle of friends and develops an unhealthy fascination with Kevin, and a crazed old man grabs Ellie in a public square and shoves a tattered Bible into her hands, exclaiming, “You need it. It will save your soul.” Soon, Ellie finds herself plunged into a haunting world of vengeful fairies, Maori mythology, romance, betrayal, and an epic battle for immortality.

Brief review: Guardian is an excellent book full of adventure and mystery and delicious descriptions. I love the way the two main storylines twist together at some points and I love how the dangers of one storyline, while important, is so much smaller than the horrifying dangers of the other. Ellie is an amazing character, and it’s wonderful to have a character who not only describes herself as plain and big, but actually is. I really enjoyed the time I spent in her head, which isn’t something I can say for many first person characters. Sometimes she’s whiny, sometimes she’s scared, sometimes she says and does really stupid, hurtful things, but she keeps trying to be a good person and to be brave enough to do what she needs to do. Though some of the background characters felt pretty flat at times, interchangeable, especially those introduced in the second half of the book, a couple really stood out as wonderful. (La Gribaldi, in particular, is my new literary crush.) The pacing is a little odd, though not necessarily off; the second half is much faster paced than the first half, but the stakes are a lot higher, too. Though the blurbs mention how frightening parts of the story are, I didn’t find any of it to be scary. I wasn’t looking for scary, however, and it takes a lot to frighten me and a very specific kind of story, so don’t let that turn you off from the book. I loved that Guardian includes characters of color and that the stories within it are not just stories from a white European influence. I love that Ellie struggles with not being racist; sometimes she has racist thoughts and she tries not to and sometimes she demands knowledge that isn’t hers to control, but she doesn’t want to think or do racist things and so she keeps trying not to.

I highly recommend Guardian of the Dead.

Fat Content Review (slight spoilers):

Ellie is fat. Sort of. I’ll let her describe herself, from a scene at the beginning of the book where she’s getting dressed in a school uniform:

“The scratchy wool cut into my upper arms and stretched awkwardly over my belly, leaving a bulging strip of white cotton [her long sleeved shirt, not her underwear] exposed between skirt waist and jersey hem. I’d always been big, but after half a year with no exercise, living on the dining hall’s stodgy vegetarian option, I’d gone up two sizes to something that I was afraid approached outright fat, without even the consolation of finally developing a decent rack.”

I do like a couple things about this, details which are frequently left out of portrayals of fat women in media. First, I like that she doesn’t have big breasts. The assumption that fat women have big breasts doesn’t just show up in media, though; clothing designers believe this, too. It’s almost impossible to find plus-size shirts that aren’t cut for C cups or larger. Second, I really love the detail about the jersey being too tight in her upper arms, which is something else that is frequently a problem with clothes, and something I rarely read about in stories about fat women.

What I don’t like, of course, is her fear of being, oh god no! the horror!, actually fat.

So the issue of whether Ellie is actually a fat protagonist is somewhat up in the air. She is big, though, tall and sturdy and strong. She takes up space, and she worries about taking up too much space, and she worries about being too big. She has trouble fitting into the seats at the theater and hunches to make herself look smaller. When she bumps into her crush — literally, I mean — he’s too skinny to try to balance her while she staggers. When she’s injured, she’s too big to be carried to bed. She still has adventures, though. She knows how to fight and is particularly good at some heavy duty kicks. She uses her size to her advantage when she needs to.

There are moments which didn’t read to me as her actually being fat, or even as big as she thinks she is (which may be intentional, because of the way so many girls and women see themselves as much larger than they are). Though Ellie does have trouble fitting into the theater seat, she doesn’t seem to have any trouble with bus seats or airline seats. (There’s a line about the bus seats being small, but they don’t come across as actually a problem.) When she needs to change clothes in the theater, though she can’t wear the prettier clothes of any of the main characters, she is able to easily find the rougher clothes of the rude mechanicals that fit.

(Edited to Add: I don’t think I was very clear in what I actually meant in the previous paragraph, so I will try again. I meant less that Ellie isn’t fat or big and more that I think sometimes Ellie comes across as seeing herself as the size she is and sometimes as seeing herself as much bigger than she is, and I’m intrigued by that. I’m also interested in the different ways we as readers interpret the size of characters. This also makes me think about the different ways we draw lines between fat and not fat, though not necessarily thin. I am absolutely not trying to draw a not-fat-enough line here, because one of the things that frustrates me about the fat acceptance movement is that people do tend to draw a sharp line between fat and not fat enough, whether or not society would treat the not-fat-enough person as fat. And different weights look different on different people. And different cultural references lead to different interpretations of character size anyway; as a friend of mine mentioned after she read this, her experience with school uniforms was that she was too big for them but she didn’t have trouble with airline seats or with wearing clothes cut for guys, and with another that there is a different expectation of comfort in, say, a theater seat and an airline seat or a bus seat depending on where you are and how you were raised. So it’s all very relative anyway, but, as I’ve said too much, very interesting.

But what’s most important is not whether you [generic you, person or character, whatever] are big enough to be considered fat but the presentation of fat in media and the way people who are perceived as fat in whatever way are treated.)

I love the way Guardian is shaped by Ellie’s size, and her worries about being big and taking up space, but isn’t a story about how Ellie learned to love herself and be loved by losing weight. Even though she eventually stops slouching, stops trying to make herself smaller and not get in the way of the world, Guardian isn’t about her being big. She just is big, and yes this influences how she views herself and how she looks at the world, but it’s not the point of the story. Ellie just is, big and plain and strong and stubborn, and though some of these things hurt her and some of these things help her, she’s not just a girl in a fat story. She’s a girl having adventures and she’s big and the world has to learn to deal with that.