Hi everyone! I’m so excited to be participating in the Blog Tour for Eat Your Hear Out today thanks to TBR and Beyond Tours! As soon as I heard about Eat Your Heart Out I knew I had to read it. This book features a zombie breakout at a fat-loss camp, in a fat positive, young adult horror that’s just as much fun as it sounds! There’s also an international giveaway at the bottom of this post!
Shaun of the Dead meets Dumplin’ in this bitingly funny YA thriller about a kickass group of teens battling a ravenous group of zombies.
In the next few hours, one of three things will happen.
1–We’ll be rescued (unlikely)
2–We’ll freeze to death (maybe)
3–We’ll be eaten by thin and athletic zombies (odds: excellent)
Vivian Ellenshaw is fat, but she knows she doesn’t need to lose weight, so she’s none too happy to find herself forced into a weight-loss camp’s van with her ex-best friend, Allie, a meathead jock who can barely drive, and the camp owner’s snobby son. And when they arrive at Camp Featherlite at the start of the worst blizzard in the history of Flagstaff, Arizona, it’s clear that something isn’t right.
Vee barely has a chance to meet the other members of her pod, all who seem as unhappy to be at Featherlite as she does, when a camper goes missing down by the lake. Then she spots something horrifying outside in the snow. Something…that isn’t human. Plus, the camp’s supposed “miracle cure” for obesity just seems fishy, and Vee and her fellow campers know they don’t need to be cured. Of anything.
Even worse, it’s not long before Camp Featherlite’s luxurious bungalows are totally overrun with zombies. What starts out as a mission to unravel the camp’s secrets turns into a desperate fight for survival–and not all of the Featherlite campers will make it out alive.
A satirical blend of horror, body positivity, and humor, Kelly deVos’s witty, biting novel proves that everyone deserves to feel validated, and taking down the evil enterprise determined to dehumanize you is a good place to start.
Eat Your Heart Out is a multi-perspective book that follows a group of characters that have been sent to a weight-loss camp. When they get to Featherlite Camp, they spot something strange out in the snow, some sort of creature, and people have gone missing. They quickly discover that the camp’s cure for obesity has a small, unwanted side-effect. It turns people into zombies.
I can’t describe how excited I was to get a copy of this book. The premise is fantastic; it’s the horror story I’ve always wanted. The book lived up to my expectations too! It was fast-paced, exciting, fun, and genuinely scary in parts. I loved the camp setting, it reminded so much of a movie. The cast are so desperate to survive, and the stakes are always so high. If you love zombie movies or books, I think you’ll have a great time with this one.
What sets Eat Your Heart Out apart from other zombie books is how fat positive it is. Not every character here has a positive relationship with their body or weight. I really appreciate Vivian, one of the main characters. She’s fat, and she’s totally happy about it. She’s shown as desirable, confident, and competent. It’s exactly the fat representation I love to see.
This book also had a heavy focus on character archetypes in horror movies. Vivian’s ex-best friend, Allie, is a total horror movie nerd, and she’s quick to label everyone with their archetype and how likely they are to survive. It was so fun to watch the characters interact with the stereotypes associated with their archetype. It added a fun new level to it where they were all aware of their potential destiny.
If you need a fast-paced, fun, zombie book with a splash of fat positive characters, this is the story for you.
CW: Fatphobia (challenged), gore, blood, death, pregnancy and childbirth.
Thanks to Penguin Young Readers Group and TBR and Beyond Tours for providing me with an Advanced Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Hi! It’s so lovely to be able to interview you, thanks for being on my blog! Let’s start with a more important question: what does fat representation mean to you? And especially positive fat representation?
A million thanks for having me!
In media today, we fat people have two problems. One is that we are completely underrepresented in books, movies and television shows, etc. We’re over 30% of people in America but around 6% of all the characters seen on screen and in print. The other issue is that, even when we are represented, it’s often in a way that’s extremely negative. We are villains or cautionary tales or objectivity lessons or comic relief. Positive fat representation means treating fat characters like people and showing them in a variety of different roles with a variety of characteristics. Eat Your Heart Out has a number of fat characters and they’re all teens with different dreams and both positive and negative personality traits. Most importantly, the book has fat heroes which hasn’t yet happened all that often in thrillers and horror.
I loved Allie’s love of horror films and the focus on character archetypes. If you were a character archetype which one do you think you’d be?
I think I’d be The Outcast. I kind of want to be Action Girl. But I would definitely describe myself as a “bookish weirdo” and I would also like to think that all the book research I have done has given me some special, hidden skills.
There’s a wide variety of perspectives in Eat Your Heart Out, did you have a favourite one to write and why?
I had a ton of fun writing Vivian and Allie which were fun in different ways. Vivian most directly challenges fatphobia and vocalizes what it’s doing to her. With Allie, I got to do a lot of research about student filmmaking which was incredibly interesting. I learned a lot about writing and formatting screenplays.
Can you tell us a little about your writing process? What did you find most difficult, and what was the most fun?
I keep telling myself that I’ll never write another book where it’s dark all of the time. It’s hard to keep track of all the flashlights and light sources. At one point, I had a spreadsheet of where each character was, what time it was and where all the flashlights were located. I had a ton of fun writing the zombie fight sequences. It felt good to let my characters destroy that fat camp.
And finally, do you have a message for my readers? What are you hoping they’ll take away from reading your book?
First of all, I’m hoping the book is a fun read. Beyond that, I hope readers will think a bit more about diet culture and its relationship to culture overall. I’d love for people to understand that they don’t have to be thin to feel good about themselves.
Kelly deVos is from Gilbert, Arizona, where she lives with her high school sweetheart husband, amazing teen daughter and superhero dog, Cocoa. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from Arizona State University. When not reading or writing, Kelly can typically be found with a mocha in hand, bingeing the latest TV shows and adding to her ever-growing sticker collection.
Kelly is represented by Chloe Seager of the Madeleine Milburn Literary Agency in London. Her work on body positivity has been featured in the New York Times as well as on Vulture, Salon, Bustle and SheKnows. Her debut novel, Fat Girl on a Plane was named one of the “50 Best Summer Reads of All Time” by Reader’s Digest magazine. Her second book, Day Zero, is available now from Inkyard Press/HarperCollins.
Website | Twitter | Instagram | Goodreads
Eat Your Heart Out released on the 29th of June! There’s never been a better time to go pick up a copy!
If you want to remember to check out this book you should add it to Goodreads!
You can get this book from major book sellers such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Book Depository, Indigo, Indiebound, Blackwells, and Waterstones.
I’d recommend checking out your local indie bookshop! You can use Hive.co.uk and Bookshop.org to support them depending on your location!
This giveaway is open internationally and one winner will receive a finished copy of this book. The giveaway starts on June 28th and ends on July 5th so get in there quickly! You can enter by clicking here!
I’m so excited to see what everyone else’s thoughts were! Here’s the schedule if you’re interested in having a look.
Luminosity Library 
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