Build community, reduce isolation, and enhance campus education by joining a peer-based book club! The UW Tacoma Library, in collaboration with the Center for Equity and Inclusion, is pleased to announce that its award-winning social justice book club, Real Lit[erature], will meet remotely again Winter Quarter 2022! 

We would like to invite UW students, faculty, and staff to join us to read our newest Young Adult fiction selection: 

Fat Chance, Charlie Vega by Crystal Maldonado
via Zoom
Thursdays from 12:30pm – 1:30pm
Free books are given to UW Tacoma students first, on a first come, first serve basis.

REGISTER HERE!

The goals of Real Lit have always been to create a greater awareness and discussion of the experiences that are being had by our students, staff, and community members. By interacting with narratives that reflect different experiences, it has provided opportunities to dialogue with peers about shared and disparate experiences.

We strive to be an actively anti-racist space and spend the first session crafting and reviewing community agreements.

About Fat Chance, Charlie Vega:

Coming of age as a Fat brown girl in a white Connecticut suburb is hard.

Harder when your whole life is on fire, though.

Charlie Vega is a lot of things. Smart. Funny. Artistic. Ambitious. Fat.

People sometimes have a problem with that last one. Especially her mom. Charlie wants a good relationship with her body, but it’s hard, and her mom leaving a billion weight loss shakes on her dresser doesn’t help. The world and everyone in it have ideas about what she should look like: thinner, lighter, slimmer-faced, straighter-haired. Be smaller. Be whiter. Be quieter.

But there’s one person who’s always in Charlie’s corner: her best friend Amelia. Slim. Popular. Athletic. Totally dope. So when Charlie starts a tentative relationship with cute classmate Brian, the first worthwhile guy to notice her, everything is perfect until she learns one thing–he asked Amelia out first. So is she his second choice or what? Does he even really see her?

Because it’s time people did.

A sensitive, funny, and painfully honest coming-of-age story with a wry voice and tons of chisme, Fat Chance, Charlie Vega tackles our relationships to our parents, our bodies, our cultures, and ourselves.” – Penguin Random House

Selected praise for Fat Chance, Charlie Vega:

★ “Charlie’s struggles are authentic and raw while Maldonado’s bright prose makes for a page-turner. . . . An overdue and welcome ingénue.”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“Charlie’s emotional arc hits all the right notes, resulting in a warm and insightful coming-of-age tale.”—Publishers Weekly

“This book feels like your best friend giving you a hug—it’s warm and sweet and healing.”—Mason Deaver, bestselling author of I Wish You All the Best

To register for Winter Quarter 2022: SIGN UP HERE!