This guide is based on the Penguin Random House 2021 edition.Ĭontent Warning: Starfish discusses emotional and food-related abuse as well as fat-shaming. Wood, Ellie learns to embrace her own worth as a person and use her words to stand up to bullies without becoming one herself. With the help of her new friend, Catalina, and her therapist Dr. She is bullied at school by her classmates, and at home by her mother, who disregards Ellie’s feelings and sees her weight as a problem to be relentlessly attacked. (Mar.Ellie teaches herself to live by self-imposed “Fat Girl Rules,” metaphorically shrinking herself to avoid drawing attention to herself. Fipps’s use of verse is as effective as it is fitting Ellie dreams of becoming a storyteller and poet “to help people feel what it’s like/ to live in/ someone else’s skin.” A triumphant and poignantly drawn journey toward self-acceptance and self-advocacy. With support from new friends, her father, and a therapist who acknowledges her feelings and helps her discover her voice, Ellie finds the strength to stand up to her bullies, including her mother, who pressures Ellie to undergo bariatric surgery, and verbally abusive older siblings.
When her best friend Viv moves away, Ellie feels alone at her Dallas, Tex., school, but she soon forms a tentative bond with her new neighbor, Catalina Rodriguez, whose boisterous, loving Mexican family makes her feel accepted for who she is. Told in verse, this affirming representation of fatness stars Ellie Montgomery-Hofstein, 11, who, to avoid the bullying she’s endured since the age of five, lives by the Fat Girl Rules-the unspoken rules one learns “when you break them-/ and suffer/ the consequences.” Finding solace from taunts and judgment in her fenced-in backyard’s pool, Ellie, who is half-Christian, half-Jewish, and presumed white, enjoys sprawling in the water like a starfish, weightless and free.
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