Beautiful writing about a young girl in Harlem's struggle with her weight and how others view her. The exploration of all the characters- Malaya, her parents, and her grandmother, was done with such precision and vulnerability. I felt for Malaya in navigating a fatphobic world as someone in a larger body, and to see how that shame was passed down through the generations.

BIG GIRL by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is a masterclass in character-driven storytelling. All of the characters--even secondary characters who were in the narrator's life briefly--are well developed and feel like they have fully formed lives they live off the page. Malaya, her mother, and her maternal grandmother felt like people I've known in my life, especially the two adult women who continue to pass down the harmful, fatphobic language they have been told all their lives. I would have spent hundreds more pages with these women and I have continued to think about them even though I finished the book a week ago. (I could not put the book down!)

I can't wait to have BIG GIRL on my shelves and share it with my creative writing students. Thank you for the opportunity to read the e-galley. I'll definitely be planning lessons that utilize BIG GIRL for my fall writing classes!

An insatiably written study of identity and exploration of a character. Big Girl is a literary beauty.

This is a moving, compassionate coming-of-age story of a young, black, extremely obese teenage girl/woman in Harlem. The story is painted slowly, empathetically as we come to experience her experience in her family, her school, and community as a fat black teenager. What sets this story apart is the attention to her inner life and the caring Sullivan gives to the main characters- Malaya, her mother and father, and her maternal grandmother.

Less attention but no less vividly introduced are her friends and sometime lovers, and her frustration with that aspect of her social relationships. Additionally, her family's pressure on her to lose weight is slowly brought to our attention that this is not only an issue they have with Malaya's weight and body, but their own-- mother, grandmother- and their experience as black women.

Instead of being told they hold pain and shame in their bodies, we are moved to feel that shame. It is a gift to be able to write in such a way as to not didactically inform the reader of the characters' emotions and motivations, but invoke those feelings in the reader.

I am looking forward to Sullivan's future work. Many thanks to NetGalley for the eARC.