Oh my god this book! I knew going in that there was going to be moments that are triggering and enraging for me as I struggled with my weight and the comments I received from it for years and the premise is about Vivian being sent to a weight-loss camp. What I didn't expect was how much grittier and gory this was and I really liked it! Vivian meets her fellow campers I knew we were going to have found family here (a trope I LOVE). I came to love all the characters (especially the one we were introduced to by the latter half). Each of them changed and learned so much as they tried to survive the zombie apocalypse they were suddenly thrust into. I appreciated the different elements that this book represented/symbolized. It explored the complexity of fatphobia and the diet-culture, deeply imbedded in our society. But it truly was the characters that made me love this book and I hope that we get a sequel for this because I want revenge for the heartache that characters experienced and mine.

Thank you Penguin Teen and Netgalley for the advanced copy for my honest review!!

Breakfast Club meets Heavyweights meets zombies in this satire horror survival ya book.

This camp is by the far the worse camp you can be sent to because it isn’t a normal weight loss camp.. nope it’s a camp ran by scientist and military personnel. But the campers don’t know this. They do know they’re being sent there to test the new place, but it’s nothing like they imagined. And worse, the weigh loss bars they have to eat are affecting them. The whole camp is on this war path of dehumanizing fat people with their “fat phobia” and think they have it solved down to the science of this one bar. But who would want to eat that? And who can survive a night with a blizzard, no power, and former fat campers turned super zombies?

Told in multiple points of view from our six main characters, we each meet someone who is being sent to this camp for different reasons. Not all are fat and some are so shamed by family that they’re being sent there. I loved the whole concept of having people with different body types being used and being sent for being considered “fat.” The way society plays the blame game on how people develop is disgusting and sad. But I loved that this book took that concept and turned it into a funny horror comedy. Like you wouldn’t expect someone who’s considered fat to survive, but there’s more to people than how thick their skin is. No brains have a lot to do with survival.

I love how you have the popular girl who is the most likely to survive with her action wit, the geek who can use his brain, the outcast who knows a lot more than you’d think, the jock who is the pretty boy but also the muscle, the jerk who could turn savior, and the basket case who is a horror movie enthusiast. They band together to stop themselves from being turned or worse.. eaten!

If you want a book that will make you laugh but also make you feel connected in a way, than look no further. Let this serve as a reminder of how much influence the diet culture has on the world and how changing yourself could just turn you into a mindless zombie.. now who wants to be a mindless zombie when they can be themselves and tell the world to go screw itself!!!

I thought overall this book was something new and interesting when I gave it a read. I find zombie stories to be quite interesting honestly! I also really love the cover design and find it to be super eye catching as well. That was the first thing I noticed about this book!

I started this thinking I would read just a bit here and there, then read it straight through! I just had to find out who escaped! I thoroughly enjoyed this book! It was a lot of fun and not too terribly descriptive of the gore and things when the monsters attacked. I appreciated that

This was a lot of fun.

Eat Your Heart Out has multiple points of view. Our main girl is Vivian though. Vee (Vivian) is athletic, but not skinny. Her mom married her coach and he is not nice to Vee. He's always making comments about her weight and her mom has started to side with him. So Vee is off to "fat camp". A guy, Steve, comes to pick her up. Steve is the strong jock and is in charge of their pod of campers. Vee turns around to find her ex best friend, Allie, in the back seat. She doesn't really question how Allie could afford to go. She's just angry that she's there. They pick up another camper, Paul, who ends up being there as a spy. His dad runs things. There is a blizzard in Arizona and they have an accident after seeing something unnatural running across the road. The kids manage to walk to camp after hearing that someone is missing and others are out searching. They have two others in their pod. Sheldon is a computer wiz and Rachel is hiding a pregnancy. They are told to eat these weird nutrition bars, but no one is their group wants to. And it's good that they didn't. The bars make the kids lose weight overnight. But they also turn them into zombies. The power is out and there are no phones. The place is overrun by unnaturally strong zombie people and not everyone will survive. They do all bond and I loved the friendships/love that grew. I also love that Paul grew into someone that will never fat shame again.

The pacing is great and this is a quick read. It's full of fat phobia and difficult parental relationships. But there was such a great connection with the kids. Rachel was probably my favorite person. I also liked Brian who you meet late in the story. That part really stood out to me.

I gave this book 4 stars. Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for my review copy.

Warnings for fat shaming/phobia, talk of cheating, parental issues, mention of abuse, and teenage pregnancy. Also, lots of blood and gore.

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I really really enjoyed this book. Honestly, going into it I wasn’t sure how I’d feel as, in general, I’m not usually a zombie fan. But I really enjoyed the take this book took on them. I cared about all of the characters and I genuinely was rooting for all of them to survive. It was sad and tragic but also I thought the relationships that were built were beautiful! I would definitely recommend this book!

What a great read! I knew from the second that I requested it that I would love it! It is so great to see plus sized characters in the media and the story was so fun!

Trigger warning for gore, death, brief mention of abuse.
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EAT YOUR HEART OUT follows a group of teens who expect that their arrival a fat camp will be completely unremarkable, but instead find themselves in the middle of a zombie outbreak during a terrible blizzard.
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If you enjoyed the zombie movie craze, you have to add this book to your tbr! It’s so cool to see a bunch of fat kids be the badasses and not just the typical comedic relief characters. It was slow starting for me and I was confused by all of the different POVs, but when it picked up I started to get the hang of it and it kept my attention. I was rooting for all of these characters. The writing was good, the characters were interesting; this was an entertaining story of surviving a zombie outbreak. I’d like to read more from this author!
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3.5/5 stars, EAT YOUR HEART OUT by Kelly deVos is available June 29, 2021!
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Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin Teen for sending me an eARC to review.

A group of teens being forced to spend the summer at a weight-loss camp know it's going to be an awful place, but when they arrive to find the camp in the middle of a zombie takeover, they realize their time at Camp Feather-lite is going to be even more of a horror movie than they originally thought.
Vee is a teen girl who knows she doesn't need to be "fixed", but that doesn't stop her parents from sending her to the horrible Camp Feather-lite anyway. To make matters worse, her former best friend Allie ends up in her group, and they're joined by a cast of characters who Allie immediately recognizes as the horror movie tropes they are: The Jerk (the son of the camp's owner), The Nerd (an electronics and hacker extraordinaire), The Outcast (a quiet girl keeping a big secret), and their driver and group facilitator, The Jock with the Heart of Gold, or maybe the Courageous Captain, Allie can't decide. Either way, if they want to survive Camp-Featherlite, they're in for a long night of fighting against evil of multiple kinds.
This book is a zombie story, but the real villain at play is the fatphobia that forced these teens into a camp designed to make them lose weight in the first place. The book highlights the harm caused by a society that tells people there is something wrong with them when there isn't.
There is so much to love about this book, I personally enjoyed the distinct characters and all their individual personalities and strengths and weaknesses, the campy, over-the-top zombie flick vibes, and the really important social commentary. I had so much fun staying up late to finish it, and highly recommend it!

As someone who loves zombie books - one of the biggest reason I fell back in love with reading a decade ago, I was so excited to see a YA zombie horror/thriller - not only with a pink cover but with a fat girl like myself.

This book was such a fun read, there are multiple POV and I loved getting to know each character more and their "cliché" roles in the book -

I really hope we get a second book even though this could go as a stand alone there is room for answers and i seriously look forward to getting to know everyone better.

Thanks Penguin Teen for the E - Arc

This was fantastic! Body positivity at its finest, something you don't see enough of in YA or books in general, is front and center in this book. But more than that, it's a fun, slasher/Final Girl novel filled with zombies and a wide array of characters, some of whom you will love and others who you will hate. There are secrets and twists and it's just a great time if you're a fan of camp-style horrors.

Absolutely loved this fast-paced and often hilarious parody thriller. Delightful characters and the quick change between narration kept the action pulsing. Would recommend.

this was such a fun read! it was multi-pov which i truly enjoyed and i didn’t feel like any of the characters were cheesy or annoying. definitely would recommend this to people.

This YA horror is pitched so perfectly. It really is like <i>Shaun of the Dead</i> meets DUMPLIN'. This mashup has both the conversations surrounding fatphobia and diet culture alongside the unlikely group of individuals, each fitting a specific movie archetype, having to battle zombies.

How are fat camps still even a thing? Don't they belong in a museum with inflatable dart boards, Flowbeers, and Thigh Masters?

I loved how the conversation around weight was done, I loved how much acceptance was in this story, and how despite being set at a fat-camp, and how this particular zombie apocalypse unfolds, it doesn't feel like a story about being fat. Even though it is. Hard to explain!

Between the gorgeously colourful cover with a fat girl, unapologetically front and centre, and the satirical content that sadly doesn't feel far off from how fatness is dealt with in our own world, this is a read that we all need. Sure, we're sorta in out own apocalypse but this particular set-up is lightyears away from our own. I promise it won't stress you out!

I'm not sure I would reread this, which is usually why I award four stars to books, but I just appreciate this so much. Was it perfect? No. While we get to know the characters enough to be invested, it is still a bit surface level, as we're thrown pretty much right into disaster mode. Think of the way <i>Cloverfield</i> unfolds. We sorta get to know our protagonists as they navigate their new reality but it's more about surviving than anything else. But this book did exactly what it set out to do and it still managed to have a few surprises along the way, too. Would recommend!

I really enjoyed this book. It was compared to Shaun of the Dead and I totally got that feeling.

I really enjoyed how the entire book is made up of fat characters who do everything the skinny characters do. They run, fight zombies, kick butt, and survive. It was such a nice change considering the fat characters are always the comedic relief or there to only make the skinny ones better. In this book, they were the heroes!

I really enjoyed this book. It was a fun zombie book, that also dealt with health and how fat doesn't equal unhealthy. I was expecting them to have more time at camp, but it just jumps right into the zombie fighting which made this a very quick read. Some of the issues were dealt with very quickly, but I think that it just made the reader think about the issue on their own, as opposed to being preached at which I appreciated. Overall I enjoyed this quick read and will probably be buying it for the YA section of the library.

A fast and funny satire that flips society's obsession with thinness on its head and makes much needed space for a group of physically diverse teens to become heroes. Though I'm not much of a horror reader, I love social satire and this fit the bill perfectly. In EYHO, deVos uses her plot not so much to shock or instill terror (though the prose has its share of suspense and gore), but to make a damned good point, and to do it in an entertaining and visceral way.

Most of all, I loved that this wasn't a story with one token fat kid. So often, I feel like token representation in any form leads to characters who either embody/internalize all of society's shaming mechanisms, or to characters who miraculously brush off all the stigmas and microaggressions and become paragons of self-love that can feel inspiring but ultimately out of reach for many readers. By giving us an entire group of plus-sized teens, all with different bodies, physical abilities, histories, interests, and personalities, deVos is able to paint a much more complex picture of what it means to be fat in a world obsessed with being thin. Namely: different things to different people. All of her characters are brave. They also all make mistakes. They struggle with friendship issues and family dramas that have nothing to do with their weight. Some characters are proud of their bodies. Some are not, and yet they are all acutely aware of the prejudices they face and the messages society imparts. Because of course they are. Those messages are loud and constant.

While the story grapples with issues around fat-shaming and thinness obsession, it's far from preachy or pedantic. It's a page-turning romp about kids snowed into an isolated camp and fighting zombies with plastic oars and homemade Molotov cocktails. What more could you want?

I requested this one because it might be a 2021 title I would like to review on my Youtube Channel. However, after reading the first several chapters I have determined that this book is not my tastes. So I decided to DNF this one rather than push myself to finish it only to give it a poor review.

I liked the body positive messaging but the satirical tone was rubbing you the wrong way.

*Spoiler free*

A book about a fat girl being badass. That was pretty much all I needed to be completely on board for this book. But, this book was about a fat girl who got sent to fat camp, and is not being badass fighting zombies. Heck yeah, that sounded like a book I wanted to read! Trigger warnings: fatphobia, gore, blood

This book is batshit, balls to the walls nuts. It was so not what I was expecting and I'm trying to see if I mean that in negative or positive way.

Going into this book, I thought it was going to only focus and be told from Vivian's point of view. But, there is actually six POVs! I enjoyed most of the stories of all the characters, but it created a very, very chaotic overall storyline.

There were positives to these POVs. It made me want to race through this book, because it seemed like things were happening back to back to back. The dramatics are high, as are the stakes. It gets intense, and all these POVs only heighten this.

Though, on the negative side, there is so much going on at the same. I felt like certain themes were picked up, and then dropped. Or randomly pop up, only to drop off into the background later. I would have liked for certain things, such as Rachel's relationship with religion or Vivian's relationship with her stepdad, to have a thread throughout the entire story. But, they seemed to only pop in here and there. And because there is so much happening all the time, even from the beginning, there are so many names to keep track of. On top of this, sometimes last names are used, sometimes they are. Nicknames too! Then, there were so many relationships to keep track of. Because there are so many, there were some that felt like they happened so fast. Even with the heightened emotions of the experience, the romance especially seemed like it kind of came out of nowhere. I think the book would have even benefitted with no romance subplot. Vivian's storyline, I think, would have been a lot stronger and her actions at the end would have spoken to her character a lot more, which would have been cool.

The zombies of this book were really, really well done. I loved the lore behind them, and I thought the science to their creation was really smart. I know there have been so many different kinds of zombies done, but these felt so original!

Another thing I enjoyed was that this book was filled with fat characters being badass. Not in spite of them being fat, just because they could be badass. Yes, they are at a fat camp, but that gets turned out its head very quickly. I think Vivian's relationship with her body could have been fleshed out just slightly more, but overall, I really, really loved how this book depicted fatness.

One of the things that this book did really well was depict teens reacting to a zombie outbreak realistically. They're freaked out. They want adults. They get hurt, and scream, and freak out. They throw together plans and things catch on fire. This book gets absolutely wild and it does not hold back.

Really, I'm trying to decide if I liked the nutsness of this book. It created a book that was completely nuts, but I felt like there were things that could benefitted from a plotline that was a bit less nuts. Overall, I thought this book was really good! There were just a few things I didn't completely fall in love with.