Book Review: Fat Chance

Book: Fat Chance by Nick Spalding

Source: Borrowed from Publisher/NetGalley for an honest review

Publication: Available now

Description:

Meet Zoe and Greg Milton, a married couple who have let themselves go a bit.

Zoe was a stunner in her college days, but the intervening decades have added five stone, and removed most of her self-esteem. Greg's rugby-playing days are well and truly behind him, thanks to countless pints of beer and chicken curry.

When Elise, a radio DJ and Zoe's best friend, tells them about a new competition, it seems like the perfect opportunity to turn their lives around. Fat Chance will pit six hefty couples against one another to see who can collectively lose the most weight and walk away with a £50,000 prize.

So begins six months of abject misery, tears, and frustration — that just might turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to them — in another laugh-out-loud look at the way we live now from bestselling author Nick Spalding.


Rating: 1 star

Review:

Fat Chance is about Zoe and her husband Greg who enter a radio weight loss competition. It's similar to The Biggest Loser but in radio form. The winning team will win £50,000. The story follows Zoe and Greg's weight loss journey through journal entries. The chapters rotate between Zoe and Greg's entries. They detail their progress as well as describing every other thing going on in their lives.

In this story, there were moments that I found funny but overall this was rather boring. This was not very good. I found it hard to like main characters Zoe and Greg Milton. Some times they were written for the reader to feel sorry for them but that's hard to do when they are both jerks. They are very judgmental and never have anything really nice to say. And with the writing it was sometimes hard to distinguish between Zoe and Greg's voice. They are both written with the same personality and nothing feels different. I also didn't like Zoe's best friend Elise who talked Zoe into entering the competition and then embarrasses her on the air with personal questions all for ratings. The journal entries are supposed to be written in the past tense but they're all written in the present. Not to mention how personal they are, it's hard to believe that anyone would include all of those things in a journal that so many people are going to read.

I also felt like most of the scenes in the story went on for far too long and I don't understand why there were so many casual references to rape. When did rape become funny or used as way to describe something that is frustrating? There was also quite a lot of sexist, homophobic, and racist remarks and not so subtle comments throughout that I'm not sure why they were in the story. It makes me wonder if this is the author's feelings and opinions.

For some reason everything about this felt stereotypical and not very funny. The more I read of this book the less I liked it. At first this seemed like it was going to be a funny book where a couple had entered a competition to lose weight but as the story went on it was far from being funny. All the humor felt forced and with such unlikeable characters it's hard to root for them to succeed.

I don't know who I would even recommend this to, it was such a disappointing read.