FAT CAMP COMMANDOS

Pinkwater is in fine satirical form in this hilarious sendup of the diet industry, in which a fat threesome gets revenge after being shipped off to a weight-loss camp. A lecture given on Anti-Fat Day, a local holiday when thin citizens demonstrate their affection for their fat neighbors by hurling doughnuts and screaming insults at them, convinces the parents of Ralph and Sylvia that they must send their overweight children to Camp Noo Yoo so that they can become “all skinny and perfect.” At camp, the fat and once happy siblings dine on carrots, do compulsory aerobics, and attend “Creative Abuse and Motivation classes,” where they are told in vivid, side-splitting detail—“You will lose your job collecting dead skunks for the Fish and Wildlife Service” and “wind up in prison for stealing pumpkin pies”—how horrible their lives will be if they don’t slim down. Fellow camper Mavis, “a little round fatball of fury,” talks them into breaking out and wreaking vengeance on the gaunt and the proud. In the funniest and most pointed part here, the kids decide to give the self-righteous scrawny a taste of their own medicine, skewering them with the kind of insults (“Hey, pipe-cleaner man!”) and unsolicited advice (“You shouldn’t run at your weight . . . You should rest . . . and eat nourishing food”) that fat people routinely endure. In a fun and surprising resolution, the kids learn how to channel their feelings more constructively; finally realizing that creativity is sweeter than revenge. Delicious and nutritious. (Fiction. 8-13)