MTL YA Fest Author/Book Spotlight: Crystal Maldonado

About The Book:

Title: Fat Chance, Charlie Vega (debut)
Author: Crystal Maldonado
Pub Date: February 2nd, 2021 (hardcover) January 4th, 2022 (paperback)

Coming of age as a Fat brown girl in a white Connecticut suburb is hard.
Harder when your whole life is on fire, though.

Charlie Vega is a lot of things. Smart. Funny. Artistic. Ambitious. Fat.

People sometimes have a problem with that last one. Especially her mom. Charlie wants a good relationship with her body, but it’s hard, and her mom leaving a billion weight loss shakes on her dresser doesn’t help. The world and everyone in it has ideas about what she should look like: thinner, lighter, slimmer-faced, straighter-haired. Be smaller. Be whiter. Be quieter.

But there’s one person who’s always in Charlie’s corner: her best friend Amelia. Slim. Popular. Athletic. Totally dope. So when Charlie starts a tentative relationship with cute classmate Brian, the first worthwhile guy to notice her, everything is perfect until she learns one thing–he asked Amelia out first. So is she his second choice or what? Does he even really see her?

Because it’s time people did.

About The Author:

Crystal Maldonado is a young adult author with a lot of feelings. Her work has been published in the Hartford Courant, Buzzfeed, and Latina Magazine.

By day, she is a social media manager working in higher ed, and by night, a writer who loves Beyoncé, shopping, spending too much time on her phone, and being extra.

She lives in western Massachusetts with her husband, daughter, and dog. Follow her everywhere @crystalwrote