"Nothing much ever happens in Antler, Texas. Nothing much at all. Until this afternoon, when an old blue Thunderbird pulls a trailer decorated with Christmas lights in to the Dairy Maid parking lot. The red words painted on the trailer cause quite a buzz around town, and before an hour is up, half of Antler is standing in line with two dollars clutched in hand to see the fattest boy in the world."
Toby and his best friend, Cal, are getting ready to head back to school near the end of another uneventful summer, when a new sensation arrives in town that will have an unexpected impact on both of their lives. Zachary Beaver, billed as "the fattest boy in the world," weighs six hundred and forty-three pounds and travels the country in a trailer, charging curious spectators for a glimpse of his prodigious girth. When Zachary is deserted by his caretaker, the boys find themselves thrust into an unwanted friendship with the enormous boy. Zachary is often rude and surly, and seems to harbor many secrets, and Cal and Toby see him as a burden at first. Little by little, however, Zachary lowers his guard and reveals himself to be much more complex than he first appears.
Meanwhile, Toby, the narrator of our tale, has other worries. Like how to get Scarlett, the pretty blonde girl from his school, to think of him as more than a friend (while avoiding her menacing boyfriend, Juan). Not only that, but Toby's mom has left the family in Texas to enter a singing contest in Nashville, and Toby notices some disturbing signs that seem to indicate that she may not be planning to return.
Set in the early seventies against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, this surprisingly complex book is often funny, and occasionally quite sad. It is a story about the complexities of friendship and the difficulty of fitting in. A winner of the National Book Award, this is a story anyone can relate to: it documents that awkward period between childhood and adulthood that can be one of the most difficult periods in anyone's life. At the same time, it is a story about a (literally) larger than life character that is utterly unique in the world of fiction.
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