REVIEW: I Get So Hungry

Campbell, B.M.  (2008).  I Get So Hungry.  New York:  G.P. Putnam's Sons.

9780399243110

Nikki comes back to start a new year of school to find a new teacher and an classmate teasing her about her weight.

Throughout the school year, she deals with her dependency on food, pressure to be thin and her growing appreciation of her new teacher who is also heavy.

While many of the illustrations include abstract components, they also very realistically portray Nikki and the other characters with lots of multicultural representation.

Activities:

This is a great book to discuss proper nutrition, healthy dieting and exercise as well bullying and teasing based on weight and size.  Depending on the students' dispositions, a teacher can go into more specifics about using food to deal with darker emotions, the stress of being a child with an obese parent, the images in popular culture and the media that imply only skinny people are beautiful, the rise in childhood diabetes, etc.

Quotes of Note:

"On the first day of school

I walk into my new classroom and

standing in the middle is a rainbow

woman."

"I stayed home

and--" I say.

"--ate everything in the house,"

Arnold says.  "Hey, Supersize, don't 

break the desk."

"Potato chips always make me feel better

when I'm sad.  No one is supposed to eat in

class, but I can't resist."

"A diet?" Mom laughs.  "We come from a long

line of big-boned women.  we'll never be Skinny

Minnies."

I don't want to be so big anymore."