Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have

Overview

Andrew Zansky is fifteen, self-described as the second-heaviest kid in his high school, and mostly resigned to being overlooked. That changes when a new girl arrives and Andrew becomes convinced that the fastest route to her attention runs through the varsity football field, despite having no business being anywhere near it.

What follows is less a sports story than a chronicle of a kid trying to reinvent himself through sheer nerve. Andrew talks his way onto the team, improvises his way through practices he isn't prepared for, and narrates the whole scheme with a wry, self-aware humor that keeps the book from ever feeling like a lecture about body image or belonging.

The novel stays close to Andrew's internal voice throughout, which is where its comic energy and its occasional ache both come from: he is funny because he sees himself clearly, and sympathetic for the same reason.

A Coming-of-Age Story Told Through the Body

Zadoff's novel sits in a lineage of comic YA narrators who use humor to manage a world that hasn't quite made room for them. Andrew's weight is the engine of the plot — it's why he's underestimated, why joining the team is a joke to everyone but him, and why his crush feels like a long shot — but the book resists turning that fact into a simple lesson about self-acceptance. Instead, it lets Andrew be ambitious, a little delusional, and often very funny about his own situation.

The football-team premise also lets the story needle at conventional ideas of who gets to be an athlete, a romantic lead, or a protagonist at all. Andrew's scheme is absurd on its face, and the book knows it, but it takes his wanting — to be seen, to be chosen, to matter to someone — completely seriously even while laughing at how he goes about it.

Why Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have Has Been Challenged

Objections to the novel have generally centered on its frank, teenage-boy narration around body weight, sex, and crushes — subject matter some parents and reviewing committees have considered too mature or too crude for the middle-grade and early-high-school readers who pick it up. Andrew's preoccupation with the girl he's chasing, and the locker-room and adolescent-male perspective through which the story is told, have drawn concern as sexual content, even though the book's humor is aimed more at Andrew's own insecurities than at anything explicit. In the records kept by this catalog, the title has been challenged in 1 state and 1 school district, reflecting a narrow but real disagreement over whether its comic, unfiltered take on teenage desire and self-image belongs on shelves for younger readers.