13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (Awad) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Simultaneously tart and tender, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is stunning.... The way food and body image define Elizabeth’s life is depressing and sad. But the book is neither. There is so much humor here—much of it dark, but spot on, like Dolores in Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone or Lena Dunham in Girls.... As you watch Lizzie navigate fraught relationships—with food, men, girlfriends, her parents and even with herself—you’ll want to grab a friend and say: "Whoa. This. Exactly."
Washington Post


Heartbreaking…[rife] with beauty and humor.... As addictive as potato chips and as painful as the prospect of eating nothing but 4-ounce portions of steamed fish for the rest of your life.
Chicago Tribune


Awad explores the sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking ways that a person’s struggle with body image can seep into every part of her existence.... 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is not really about how Lizzie March looks…[it's] about how she sees herself.
Wall Street Journal


Awad is an incredibly skilled writer, with a rare ability to construct tiny moments of both acute empathy and astonishing depth…and] a profoundly sensitive understanding of the subject matter.... It’s impossible not to be deeply affected by [her] prose.... A real narrative achievement.
Globe and Mail (Canada)


Absorbing…. Subtle but poignant.... This sort of intrafeminine aggression will be familiar to most women, whatever side of the body war they’ve been on. But it is is a side of experience that hasn’t been much explored by literary novelists.
Guardian (UK)


With dark humor and heartbreaking honesty, Awad cuts away at diet culture and the pressure on women to make thinness and beauty their priority.
San Francisco Chronicle


Awad’s satiric edge is on display in her debut novel.
Los Angeles Times


It's as if the writer has eavesdropped on your most pathetic, smallest thoughts.... Awad's writing is heartbreaking and witty, while her prose is insightful and sharp-elbowed in its caustic edge.... [Lizzie is] a vulnerable, funny and fierce narrator.
Salt Lake Tribune


[Lizzie's struggle] is a valuable addition to the canon of American womanhood.
Time


In this dark, honest debut, Awad sharply observes…the struggles of growing up, growing out, and trying to slim down, at any cost.
Marie Claire


The nuance Awad adds to conceptions of weight and body image is applied also to her realizations of female friendships. Lizzie’s relationships with other women are at once petty and kind, jealous and admiring.
Huffington Post


[A]ssured and terrific.... Awad artfully revisits themes related to body mass, femininity, cultural values, and resistance, finding virtually no reasons to be optimistic.... Lizzie’s witticisms, while abundant, are…a profoundly somber indictment of…gendered cultural norms.
Publishers Weekly


Touching.... Behind the title of Awad’s sharp first book, a unique novel in 13 vignettes, is brazen-voiced Lizzie, who longs for, tests, and prods the deep center of the cultural promise that thinness, no matter how one achieves it, is the prerequisite for happiness.
Booklist


(Starred review.) [P]ainfully raw—and bitingly funny.... [I]n Lizzie, Awad has created a character too vivid, too complicated, and too fundamentally human to be reduced to a single moral. Lizzie…gets under your skin, and she stays there. Beautifully constructed; a devastating novel but also a deeply empathetic one.
Kirkus Reviews