YA or STFU

Shrink to Fit (Kimani TRU series), by Dona Sarkar

Sarkar, Dona (2008). Shrink to Fit (Kimani TRU series). NY: Kimani Press. 205 pages.

Shrink to Fit is one of the novels in Harlequin imprint Kimani Press’s Kimani Tru imprint (an imprint of an imprint, I guess), the arm of the publishing group devoted to producing fiction focused, according to the website on “the and obstacles of today’s African-American youth with wit and realism!” While many of the novels do involve an element of romance, they also address social issues in a style reminiscent of the problem novels of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Shrink to Fit, the issue is anorexia. When basketball player Leah’s mother encourages her to shape up so that the two of them can land a prestigious mother-daughter modeling gig that might reignite Leah’s mother’s modeling career, Leah goes overboard with dieting. Comparing herself to her skinny friends, Leah accepts diet pills from one and logs onto a pro-anorexia website for further weight loss tips. Although she does manage to “make weight” to appear in the mother-daughter photo shoot, Leah’s crash dieting destroys her game. When, following a friend’s heart attack (the same friend who gave Leah the weight loss pills), Leah collapses at a game, she is hospitalized.

While this book is very much in the style of an After School Special (complete with Leah’s mother pointing out Leah’s “lanugo hair,” the staple of all anorexia novels, “It happens when your body starts to shut down from lack of food” [p. 131]), Leah is a fiery character who explodes with accusations like, “You guys are really something . . . You want girls who are skinny little twigs but get pissed when they try to watch their weight” [p. 149] and when she exposes the hypocrisy of her mother, who wants Leah to lose weight for the photo shoot but who calls her out on her extreme dieting.

Written by a South Asian woman (Kimani Tru books are usually by and written about Black characters), this Kimani Tru novel features a number of South Asian characters, though the protagonist is Black. It would have been interesting to see the author (or the protagonist) explore the issue of body image among women of color in particular, especially given the South Asian household traditions attributed to Leah’s diet pill using friend; however, what with the weight loss drama and Leah’s troubled relationship with her mother, I’m not sure where this would fit in. That said, I have been intrigued by the Kimani Press and Kimani Tru imprint for some time, and intend to read more of these novels. The sort of “For Us By Us” spirit of the imprint is reminiscent of urban fiction; however, that the imprint is under the auspices of the Harlequin line has the potential to complicate things. I smell a Marxist critique coming on . . . stay tuned!