I only finished this book because I hated it so much and felt it unfair to rate a book 1 star if I hadn't finished. What if the book redeemed itself in the end? This did not. ( )

It's best to ignore the blurbs on a book because they're usually meaningless, but I want to fight the authors who gave blurbs for this book. "Full of sharp insight and sly humor"? "Hilarious and cutting"? "sparkles with wit...Awad knows how to talk about the raw struggles of female friendships, sex, contact, humanness, and her voice is a wry celebration of all this at once."

I could not disagree more.

There's nothing wry, clever, or funny about this book at all. Acerbic and bitter. Perhaps deeply tragic, even.

There are 13 vignettes, 11 of which are told from the perspective of Elizabeth/Liz/Lizzie/Beth, the name she insists people use is usually connected to what sort of identity she's invented for herself. She's a fat girl who has internalized all the fatphobic propaganda of society - not only does she hate herself, as she is supposed to, she hates anyone and everyone around her.

That's perhaps the most difficult aspect of the book: the protagonist is empty. She has no real friends, no interests beyond fatness, and not once in the book does she have a nice thing to say about anyone. Her self-loathing is a poison that has coated everything, preventing Elizabeth from having a single meaningful relationship.

Truly, the closest the book come to wry or clever is in the second vignette, told from the unnamed perspective of some douchebag musician who only refers to Elizabeth as the 'Fat Girl' in his head, who should be grateful to have even his drunken, sloppy attention. That he was the one replaced at the end with another gormless musician was a funny twist. But then we were back to Elizabeth's perspective.

I suppose any cleverness lies in the way that Elizabeth's desire to be thin, and the time when she achieves her goal weight, and that it changes nothing. She is still self-conscious, still self-loathing, still deeply hateful of all women. But ultimately, this novel is just sad. A portrait of a woman who internalized all the hateful messages of society, as she was supposed to, and all it did was leave her with nothing. ( )

This felt overwrought, yet it didn't delve into stories deep enough. ( )

I enjoyed aspects of this book a lot, especially the first few chapters. But parts were hard going. I know that’s the point of the book but I felt it could have been so much more. ( )

fiction (human condition-desperation, depression, misery; weight loss struggles and how one sees oneself).
The first time I tried to read this I abandoned it in the first chapter/story for all of the self-hate; the second time, 4 years later, I pushed through and was rewarded with an unpleasant story that I probably would never recommend. At least the ending is a bit hopeful, like maybe the main character has come to terms with her body. It did not feel empowering for women of size, and who wants to read such a downer these days? ( )