Big Boned Review

Here's to fat girls on covers!!

General Impressions

Tws: bullying, parentification, mental health, attempted murder, parental neglect,...

I needed an all up in your feelings Wattpad romance and I got it.

'Big Boned' hits a lot of very hard themes head-on and it certainly gets darker than I would have expected towards the middle so make sure it's right for you but other than that, I was really happy when I got this book in the mail. Full disclosure, I don't think it hit everything right, but the fact that this book exists already says a lot not only about what people are going through and want to read about but that publishers are listening and trying to fill the void.

Alright, there's a lot to cover, so I'll start with the setting: the first thing I noticed about this book was that it was set in South Africa. Anyone that reads YA, anyone that reads should understand my excitement about that alone. Yes, it is still an English speaking country but by all the gods, it's nice having a YA contemporary book set anywhere else other than the USA or England when they are feeling exotic. In all honesty, it made no difference to the story, so much so that if they substituted the name of the cities, you would think this was set somewhere in a ritzy neighbourhood in California or New York. Oh yes, everyone here is RICH. And mostly white.

There was not one mention of economic inequality throughout the book and even racism and colourism were barely (if at all in the case of the second) addressed. Lori is probably the character that comes from the richest family and although this story makes it very clear that her household is far from perfect, I was kind of disappointed that a connection between economic welfare and mental and physical health was never made by the author.

I was much happier with how themes such as fatphobia and neurodivergent were dealt with particularly the second. Yes, this is a very tropey "jock falls for fat girl" romance but that's where cliches end. The way these two characters bond through their siblings neurodivergent and how their relationship is first and foremost a friendship and a coping mechanism as siblings to a special needs child are some of the best parts of this book. This is a book about two people that respect and understand each other, before everything else.

Something else I really appreciated was that Lori was going to therapy and taking meds throughout the entire book and that is never seen as something to be ashamed of. In fact, that is pretty much the only support system she has since that for most of the book she is being abused by her parents through parentification and neglect, forcing her to be the only carer her brother has on top of everything else going on in her life like being forced to move away from her city and everyone she knew.

I was particularly interested in Lori's mother, her main abuser, as the only "present parent": a woman that married for love and gave up her career in order to care for her children and support her husband's dreams only to find him having an affair and see everything she thought she had accomplished being destroyed. For most of the novel we see Lori's mother through her eyes so she is painted in a very unflattering light as she should, but once you read between the lines, she becomes a representation of so many women of her generation, so many of our mothers that give up years, sometimes their entire lives in order to help their partner only to from one day to the other realize that they could not count on their husbands to uplift them the same way or hit their middle-age crisis and find someone younger.

I wish Lori and her mother had made peace sooner in the book because she was such an interesting character and even in the middle of her shock and grief, she made sure that Lori knew not to commit the same mistakes she did.

Her final conversation with her father left me much more unfulfilled. He gets off pretty much scot-free and everything he has done to everyone is pretty much swept under the rug. I do acknowledge that is mostly on me since I'm pettier than YA book endings but it irks that he got everything he wanted, which is often a trend for male characters in his situation.

The ending itself was very much not YA contemporary, or better said, it was the kind of ending that we are only now getting and considering a happy one, romance wise. The only thing that left a very bitter taste on my mouth was that the way it ended hinted that ultimately self-love mattered less than being able to get whatever skinny people got, even if it wasn't morally right.

Conclusions

Theme wise this was a book that touches on so many important matters from alcoholism to sexuality to body image, violence against women (this was a big one throughout the book in so many different ways and it was masterfully done), mental health,...not all of them were given the same weight of course but the mere mention mattered. I personally feel that this book would benefit from another round of edits to erase some of the 2015 "Wattpadisms" and make sure some problems were hit on the head instead of just scratched around but I really enjoyed the book and Lori's personality especially.

Thank you to Penguin for keeping publishing books about awesome fat girls and for sending me this copy.

Rating: 4/5