The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things is a young adult novel by the American writer Carolyn Mackler, published in 2003 and set in New York City.

Virginia, who is known to everyone as Ginny, has a make-out partner called Froggy Welsh the Fourth and a wardrobe chosen to make her body less visible, and the book follows her out of those arrangements over the course of a school year. What forces the change is her brother's suspension for date rape, because Byron has been the model she measured her family against, and the information requires her to re-read everything she has been told about which of them is the successful one. The novel handles weight, self-image and a first physical relationship in a first-person voice that is funny rather than earnest, and Virginia's mother, who is unsentimental about calories and status, is the most sharply drawn adult in it. It was written for young teenagers and has been among the books that American schools and libraries most often receive complaints about, which its treatment of the family's reaction to the rape is largely responsible for.