Angie lives in Dryfalls, Ohio with what’s left of her family: a mother, a brother. Everyone at school calls her Fat Angie. Her brother and his friends oink when she walks by. Her mother isn’t much interested in talking to her unless it’s about how Angie intends to lose weight. Angie is very, very alone. Especially since her sister is missing in Iraq and was last seen severely wounded on a hostage video. Angie isn’t handling it well. She tried to kill herself in front of the entire school in the gymnasium. This hasn’t helped her image any. Everyone sees Fat Angie. Nothing more.

Then KC Romance moves to town. She’s got a purple heart tattooed on her neck and a unique vocabulary of the cool. KC zooms right for Angie her first day and a fast friendship is formed. But maybe it’s something more than that because KC is way gay-girl-gay for Angie. And maybe Angie is gay-girl-gay right back. Dryfalls, Ohio, however, is not supportive of their budding romance, and complications arise when their first kiss goes viral. It’s too much for Angie who’s trying to make the Varsity Basketball team and stay out of her mother’s war path. How can Angie be herself when everyone seems to take issue with any shred of happiness she can drum up?

E. E. Charlton Trujillo has created a novel filled with passionate longing and ferocious determination. Fat Angie is a novel about making mistakes and feeling your emotions fully as well as the different forms of grieving, healthy and not-so healthy. It is easy to get sucked into the language that develops between KC and Angie just as easily as it is to become invested in their romance. This is a book that feels unabashedly and forces you to feel right along with its characters.

© 2016 Catia Cunha

Catia Cunha has a BA in Theater Arts and English from Mount Holyoke College. She won Young Playwrights Inc.’s 2013 National Playwriting Competition where her short play “Legs” was presented as a staged reading at the Lucille Lortel Theatre at the culmination of the Conference. In the spring of 2013 she produced and acted in her first full-length play, ____space, which was presented at Mount Holyoke. Catia’s senior project, Disinsemination, a play about feminist lesbians and aliens, was presented as a staged reading at Smith College and Mount Holyoke in Fall 2013. Mount Holyoke’s Rooke Theatre produced it in March 2014. In October 2014 Catia participated in the Grex Group’s Insomniacs 24-hour play festival. She is currently working on a play about sea monsters in the subway.