The Big Reveal

In Jen Larsen’s The Big Reveal, 18-year old Adeleina Grant (Addie) tells the reader she is creative, and powerful, and fierce and will accomplish whatever she sets out to do. And we believe her because, in spite of the fact the dance-world is obsessed with a body type she definitely doesn’t fit, she’s danced her way past, around and through the fatphobia of her chosen profession to be a senior student at a top-notch Michigan school where the arts students are bound for Julliard, RISD, and Tisch, and non-arts students end up at the Ivies for their post-secondary education. Plus, she’s just been selected over applicants from all of the other schools in the country to fill the single senior spot for a summer intensive at Angles in Milan, one of the most innovative and boundary-pushing dance companies in the world, a program run by Mohadesa Rabei, a woman who has a dance vocabulary like no one else, and who is, dramatically, unapologetically fat, and perfect. It’s the program and connection Addie knows is key to her success in ever gaining the place she’s aiming for in the professional dance world.

The trouble is that Addie didn’t get a scholarship with the acceptance, and there’s no way her single, debt-ridden, alcoholic mother can fork over $6,000 for Addie to go (even if her mother wanted to, which she doesn’t), and no way for Addie to work for, borrow, beg, or steal that much money in the short time she has before the deposit for the program has to be paid. There is also no way she will allow her three steadfast friends to set up anything like a GoFundMe page because, as she tells her friends, “…that’s for people with real needs.” So, while each of her friends has already obtained a spot in the post-secondary school and program of their choice, for Addie, raising $6,000 is like …six thousand unicorns riding six thousand rockets over Candy Mountain, and her dream of being a professional dancer begins to fade. She’s going to end up going home and then to L.A., where her mother thinks she can be a star—if she’ll just diet and shed about 50 pounds—and Addie knows she’ll die in the gutter. Enter the umbrella plot that drives the story. How will Addie, who has so far not failed to achieve what she sets out to do, get to Milan?

And enter the sub-plots: friendship, loyalty, diversity, acceptance (of self and of other), bigotry, judgement, family, political standards, double-standards, and courage.

Addie’s school friends are diverse. Navaeh is a lesbian and a person of colour. Katherine is white and comes from wealth. Taylor is an American-Korean of indeterminate sexual orientation. In this narrative, except where Navaeh briefly commiserates with Addie about the bigotry Navaeh has had to put up with all of her life due to her skin colour, none of that diversity comes through as mattering at this school in this time. What matters is their creativity, determination and the loyalty to one another, and to Addie, that they exhibit throughout the book. They are her rocks. Without them, we gradually learn, Addie cannot succeed. Because, though Addie continually tells us—and has convinced Carly, the staff advisor who has always been in her corner, and her friends—that she loves her fat body just as it is and is confident she’ll get where she wants to go, she doesn’t really believe it. She has fooled them, but she is, in fact, riddled with doubt. The struggle to obtain funds to achieve her goals is real but is secondary to her inner struggle to be who she says she is. When we readers see her be wary of having her picture taken and hear her inner dialogue, we wonder how will she actually be able to put aside the body-shaming judgements she’s faced all of her life and the new hurdle of that plus the slut-shaming she now faces because of the path she chooses to raise those funds, and believe what she’s been telling others about being herself in her own bones?

Larsen employs a lot of adjectives, colourful metaphors, snappy dialogue between the friends, and inner dialogue to pull us into Addie’s world. I can clearly see and hear the school, the friendship, Addie’s homelife, and the world of dance Addie and her friends are enmeshed in. When Addie describes what it feels like when she dances, the reader feels and breathes the experience with her. When Addie dances, the reader can see the power and grace in her. There are times though when I became confused about how old these young people are because a little too often they sound more like 14-year-olds than young adults.

Over time, I found the number of repetitions of Addie’s inner doubts in the face of her continued ability to rise to the challenges she and her friends encounter dulled my sensitivity to her struggle to do as her advisor has told her. “Don’t shape yourself to fit the world. Make the world reshape itself to fit you.” Precisely because Addie never fails, there isn’t enough tension to make me believe she could or will.

There is romance, which seems obligatory in teen novels. Here, Addie’s romance with Jack feels contrived, especially when Taylor is removed from the equation for the ‘Dirty Little Secret Burlesque’ so Jack can enter the slot. And because Addie is devastated when it appears males don’t like her body, it tends to negate the core premise of the book, which is that Addie has the power within herself to achieve her goals without needing body approval by anyone, including the opposite sex. However, romance and sex are part of teenagers’ lives, and the issues of healthy sex, slut-shaming and sexual harassment are real enough and are important issues in themselves.

Overall, Larsen’s The Big Reveal is a fast-paced, strong voice for much-needed change in perspectives and policies regarding issues that are important to society as a whole. Many readers will identify with Addie, who is, indeed, talented, ambitious, lucky, and also fat and fierce. And many more will identify with the other issues raised concerning bodies, sex, politics, and equality on several levels. The climax delivers the punch readers come to expect from Addie and her friends.