The Guncle

I am a little late to The Guncle party (2021) by Steven Rowley, but better late than never, although I do have mixed feelings about it, primarily because of the anti-fat bias throughout. Patrick, who was an actor in a popular sitcom, lives alone in his Palm Springs house and hasn’t worked for several years.Continue reading “The Guncle”

The Poet X

The Poet X (2018) by Elizabeth Acevedo is an award-winning YA novel-in-verse that just blew me away. The audiobook is narrated by the author, which I especially loved, as you hear the pacing and intonation as she intended. Xiomara (pronounced See-oh-MAH-ruh) lives in Harlem with her parents and twin brother. They are 15 and Dominican,Continue reading “The Poet X”

Housemates

I was beyond excited to read Housemates (pub. Date May 28, 2024) by Emma Copley Eisenberg because she writes the Substack Frump Feelings, where in 2023 she wrote about anti-fat bias in books. I was not disappointed. Eisenberg herself, at ElectricLit, described Housemates as “about falling in romantic love and art love with your housemateContinue reading “Housemates”

The Unfortunates

The Unfortunates (2023) by J.K. Chukwu is probably better read than listened to, although I very much appreciated it, as it deals with themes of microaggressions, body size, queerness, depression, and the alienation of a black college sophomore student at a primarily white institution. Told from the perspective of Sahara, a half-Nigerian pre-med student, inContinue reading “The Unfortunates”

Now You See Us

Now You See Us (2023) is the newest novel written by Balli Kaur Jaswal (Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters) and is just as good as the others of hers that I’ve read, in a completely different way. Set in Singapore, Jaswal tells the story of a murder throughContinue reading “Now You See Us”

The Unstoppable Bridget Bloom

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 sheContinue reading “The Unstoppable Bridget Bloom”