The Unstoppable Bridget Bloom (2023) by Allison L. Bitz is a delightful fat-positive YA novel of self-discovery with some romance.
As the novel open, Bridget is moving in to her dorm room at her performing arts boarding school in Chicago–it’s a pipeline to Broadway and her parents sold land back in Nebraska so that she could attend for her junior year and take the first step towards her promising career as a performer.
Her two Dads–one is her uncle–adopted her when his sister, Bridget’s mother, died in a car accident when she was very young. She has been the star of every performance in her small Nebraska town, doing what everyone said her mother was destined for. To say that she’s a self-absorbed teenager is an understatement. But she’s also a size 18 (considered fat by many, “small-fat” in fat liberation spaces), and she’s not apologetic about it or trying to change the size of her body. As the author stated in her Note at the end of the book: “She is graceful and attractive and confident and talented and fat . . . To Bridget, her body just is.”
After her Dads leave, she finds out that she’s actually not admitted to the musical theatre program this year because she didn’t pass the music theory test. She can’t sing or perform this year at all. Plus things didn’t start out well with her roommate, and the social media star she’s followed forever doesn’t know she exists. What I loved the most is that the size or shape of her body had nothing to do with the plot, nor how any of the characters interacted with her. How refreshing that was!
Bridget does make some friends–her theory tutor, Max, and a girl she explores Chicago nightlife with, and she finds a retreat, an antique store and it’s sweet elderly owner, where she can go to get away from the stress of school. She can’t perform, but she becomes a popular accompanist, helping other singers. After making mistakes, she grows and does things she didn’t realize she could do, like write songs.
It’s a sweet coming of age novel/ bildungsroman, and everything works out in the end. The fat heroine even finds love where she least expected it!
Reading While Fat 