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Girl In Translation

There is too much anti-fat bias in this otherwise interesting immigrant coming-of-age novel.

In Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes from a Trap Feminist, Sesali Bowen (coming October 5, 2021) combines memoir and feminist cultural analysis seamlessly. Bowen centers her own fat Black queer experience, as a memoirist should, and she includes definitions to make her writing accessible to people not familiar with Black culture, and more specifically, trapContinue reading “Bad Fat Black Girl”

Storm of Locusts

For pulse-pounding Native American fantasy with no anti-fat bias, look no further than Rebecca Roanhorse, starting with Trail of Lightning and continuing into Storm of Locusts.

O Beautiful

O Beautiful by Jung Yun (coming November 2021) is the story of the return of Elinor Hanson, a forty-something former-model-turned-journalist, to North Dakota near her hometown. Avery is a town full of changes brought by the oil boom in the Bakken shale, where people sleep in parking lots because there are no hotels to beContinue reading “O Beautiful”

The Bookshop of Yesterdays

I enjoyed this weight-neutral family drama full of literary references, set in a Los Angeles independent bookstore.

Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil

This 1994 Pulitzer finalist doesn’t stand the test of time.

The Pill

It’s the novelette I wish I’d written.

The Queen’s Gambit

I wanted to like The Queen’s Gambit (1983) by Walter Tevis. Although he died in 1984, many writers list him as one of their favorite authors. (See The Writer’s Library, by Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager.) I’ve always wanted to learn to play chess, so was drawn to the idea of a girl/woman chess player,Continue reading “The Queen’s Gambit”

Fat Girl Finishing School

Fat Girl Finishing School by Rachel Wiley (2014 and reprinted in 2020) is the Columbus, Ohio area poetry slam artist’s first published book of poetry. It includes more than forty poems, including the widely-shared (and linked above) “10 Honest Thoughts on Being Loved by a Skinny Boy.” Wiley is biracial and unapologetically fat and queer.Continue reading “Fat Girl Finishing School”

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

This memoir by noted Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is highly fatphobic and didn’t make me want to begin a running habit.