Fat Angie: Homecoming is the latest installment of e.E. Charlton-Trujillo's award-winning series. In it, Angie is ready to ask Jamboree to be her girlfriend—until her first love, KC, moves back to town. As if that weren't enough, a video of her singing goes viral, making her a kind of internet sensation. When she learns about an online music competition, Angie decides to form a band and compete.

Meanwhile, tensions at home keep building. Angie's mother is still drinking and is verbally abusive—and is trying to deal with the death of Angie's sister. Angie's mostly absent father does all the wrong things. In this mire, Angie is not sure what to do about Jamboree and KC; she's just trying to figure out her day-to-day life. Whether she can pull it all together to win the competition is in question.

The characters are diverse and realistic, and their conversations are a star of the book, both propulsive and straightforward. Angie's running internal dialogue has the same quality. And though the novel starts off as a story about Angie's love life and viral video, it fast evolves into something much deeper. Its multiple threads—Angie's relationship with her mother; the family's grief over Angie's sister; the family's avoidance of their feelings; Angie's relationships with KC and Jamboree; Angie's work toward self-acceptance, including where her body is concerned; and Angie's absent father—are all significant enough to warrant their own novels. Their impacts on Angie loom. In this installment, many threads are fast resolved; some are never resolved, and so may seem superfluous.

The young adult novel Fat Angie: Homecoming is a celebration of friendship, love, and figuring out who you really are.

High school freshman Angie sees herself the way everyone else does, as "Fat Angie," until KC Romance, "a model kind of beauty beneath the bad-girl garb," breezes into her small, conservative Ohio town. Angie is relentlessly bullied at school, as well as belittled by her mother and adopted younger brother. Angie's heavily medicated family can barely communicate with each other, let alone face the loss and presumed death of Angie's older sister in Iraq. When Angie and KC bond—first platonically, then romantically—over broken homes, classic TV shows, and their respective troubled pasts, Angie gradually becomes motivated to change inside and out. Charlton-Trujillo (Feels Like Home) offers a hard-hitting third novel that swings between incredibly painful low moments and hard-won victories. The abuses Angie suffers are hard to stomach—her mother can be truly cruel ("No one is ever going to love you if you stay fat," she tells Angie at one point)—making the happiness the teenager is able to find, both through KC's help and her own persistence, come as a relief. Ages 14–up. Agent: Andrea Cascardi, Transatlantic Literary Agency. (Mar.)

Gr 9 Up—A father who abandoned the family. A couldn't-be-bothered mother. An adopted brother who is a criminal in the making. A high school full of peers who relentlessly tease her following a failed suicide attempt at a basketball game. And the only person who really understands her-her older sister-is being held hostage in Iraq and is believed to be dead by everyone except Angie. This is Angie's life. Then a gorgeous, punk-rock chick with a mysterious past, KC Romance, begins taking an interest in her. While the teen toys with the idea that she may be "gay-girl gay," she also begins to channel her pain and uncertainty by making her sister, a former state champion, proud by trying out for the varsity basketball team. Not only does Angie make the team, but she also leads it to a pivotal win. She returns home from the game to discover that her sister's body has been found. An explosive confrontation with her mother following the burial leads her to begin to see her otherwise-cold mother through a new lens. The author ends the story with no resolution in Angie's relationships with her mother and KC, leading readers to forge their own conclusions. The voice of a dry and direct third-person narrator works in a story laden with heavy topics, including war, death, suicide, cutting, bullying, and homosexuality.—Nicole Knott, Watertown High School, CT