This early-teenage novel [Dinah and the Green Fat Kingdom] is a thoroughly wholesome story…. (p. 111)

The book explores modern society's cruel treatment of people who are slightly different—the obese and the physically or mentally handicapped. It involves a perfectly normal family. Dinah learns that her parents really do love her, and that neither the pup nor the Green Fat Kingdom can compensate for her resentment of her rejection by society. She must decide to diet, not to please people or buy their good will but to please herself, or choose to stay fat and accept and respect herself that way.

A more artistic effect might have been created if the moral had been implied rather than completely defined by several characters. With the fiction market glutted with psychoanalyses of moral deviates, drug and alcohol addicts, children of divorced parents, and victims of persecution complexes, it is refreshing...