"Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have", Allen Zadoff

The narrator, Andy, is a personable and humorous high school sophomore dealing with the coming of age issues of popularity and relationships. As the back flap mentions, this is a familiar trope, but Allen Zadoff presents the issues with a twist, but we still leave with a very after school special ending for the hero.

Andy is the second fattest boy in the sophomore class and has just one close friend. His main objective is to fly under the radar away from bullies. That is, until he meets April at a wedding his mom caters the day before school starts. Andy believes he will never see her again and that it is useless to obsess over the memory of their encounter, but as you can probably predict, April is there on the first day of school.

In an effort to impress her when they first met, he had lied about being a jock. April believes she can't trust Andy when she finds out he lied to her and stops talking to him. To win her heart, he tries out for the football team when he notices April at the cheerleading auditions.

Andy becomes the team's center and popular for the first time. His status does help in getting closer to April, but only because April is using him to get closer to the quarterback, who she has a crush on, even though he's dating someone.

Andy catches the quarterback and April in a kiss and he questions what he really wants in life at that moment. Everything he had done up to that point was to please others or gain attention, but didn't align with what he was interested in.

After a climactic football game, Andy decides that he doesn't want to be a part of the popular crowd. He realizes that they were using each other and he wasn't really a part of the group. He also starts to see April for who she is; a girl maneuvering her way through high school to be popular.

The reader leaves Andy pursuing clubs that interest him and pursuing a girl who was waiting for him all along.

I would recommend this book for boys in 9th or 10th grade. There are a few curses (one character uses b* three times as an exclamation) and drinking in a party scene.

If it were a movie: PG
Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have