4.5 stars. Thank you to the publisher and author for the ARC!

First things first - I love reading about food. I love slurping up long, descriptive passages in books about what the characters are eating, what the food tastes like, what it looks like, etc and this book had it all in spades. At many points uncomfortable (even painful) to read, I found this nevertheless engrossing, like a car wreck I couldn’t look away from. Piglet’s repeated self-sabotage and self-destructive tendencies were so frustrating as a reader, but the author kept me hooked throughout and I found myself really enjoying the book. I’m looking forward to reading more from the author!

This book made me incredibly hungry! Delectable food, drama and more food! Being a foodie mysel,, I understood the importance of food in this story and how food takes part in so many areas of our life.

Piglet, who a cook book editor, has the perfect life and the story begins 98 days before her wedding. Drama ensues, and the reader is taken in a roller coaster ride of emotions.

This book was intriguing and I loved the different dynamics of her relationships with family and friends. But there was a detail in this book that was enormously frustrating for me and I wanted to throw my book at the wall, but since I was reading on my iPad, I could not. I enjoyed this story and could not put it down because I needed to know that certain detail I was speaking about.

Fantastic writing by the author and so much in this book to talk about. It would be a fantastic book for book club.

Thank you NetGalley and Henry Holt and Company for the Advanced Reader Copy. #NetGalley #Piglet

This debut novel is an absolutely engrossing delicious tale of a strong female protagonist, her spiraling out of control crazy life and her love of food. It is beautifully disastrous in a darkly satirical way. The author, Lottie Hazell using food through descriptive detail allows the reader to taste the raw, unfiltered emotion in this book. I was there for every morsel. I loved it. The book has an expected release date of March 5, 2024. It is a delectable novel you'll want to taste. Yum.

Thank you to the author Lottie Hazell, Henry Holt and Co., and NetGalley for this ARC.

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Wow. I absolutely love this novel. Piglet is a wonderful woman with a dreadful nickname. She learns that feeding herself and getting her needs met gets her called greedy or a piglet and allows herself to starve both literally and figuratively. When her heart is broken, she feeds herself to rebuild it. In the process, she remakes her life.

Piglet was a nickname given to her as a child and that’s what people still called her. She lived for food. She was a cookbook editor, and when she was happy or sad, she was always in the mood to cook or eat.

In the countdown to their wedding day, fiancé Kit admits to Piglet that he cheated on her once. No other details were needed. Piglet thought she could move forward and agreed with Kit that the wedding was still on. With each passing day, she can’t seem to shake her anger and rage. She didn’t tell all her friends, just one and her dad. The way that Lottie explains the almost torture that Kit and Piglet go through is so engrossing. I could not put this book down. I felt like I went through all the emotions with them and am still thinking about it. The back and forth that Piglet went through was honest and brutal. One minute feeling positive and the next she was almost paralyzed, not knowing what to do. The expectations both families had was interesting since they both sided with Kit and wanted Piglet to get over it. Nothing like low expectations at the start of a marriage. In the end this life-changing event did not bring her any closer to her family, but food was still there to comfort her. There was a lot of very descriptive cooking that made me want to start making big dinners. This was Lottie Hazell’s debut novel, and it was amazing.

An interesting story about a woman coming undone. A story where the person she wants to be and the person she is come to a head. I thought the premise was intriguing. It was a little repetitive. We are told fairly early into the book that Kit the fiancé has done something to betray Piglet (presumably he cheated on her). But then the rest of the book with the exception of the last like thirty odd pages or so is her trying to reconcile the fact that she knows in her heart that she doesn't want to be with him anymore, while also wanting to be the sort of person who could stay and build the life expected of her anyway. And while I like the book overall I think they either needed to tell us that information later on in the book of the confrontation needed to happen earlier. Also would have liked it more if it was discussed more what she is planning to do afterwards. The whole book is her trying not to acknowledge this betrayal and the hurt she feels because she knows that if she does everything will change. But some admittance on her part beyond the superficial "this is not what I want" and stopping the wedding would have added a lot to her character I felt. She felt rather flat and one dimensional and there wasn't any real growth throughout the story. Which perhaps is realistic but it was still a bit of a let down. However, it is a nice book whose story I enjoyed.

Devoured this in a single, Sunday afternoon. I love the conversations on class divides, rapturous food descriptions, and women being angry. Piglet isn’t trying to be anyone’s hero, she is just hungry. I love not knowing what exactly is going nor why Piglet is doing what she is doing. If you liked “Nightbitch,” this is for you.

The cover is what caught my eye initially, but the story proved to be interesting. The story follows Piglet, or Pig, and the events leading up to her wedding day. Something her fiancé discloses to her prior to the wedding creates a giant riff in their relationship and we follow Piglet wrestling with her future. There is a lot of comments on class in this novel. If you have ever dated someone out of your tax bracket, or from a more educated family, you may be able to relate. Overall though, I did not particularly care for the numerous descriptive food scenes. It felt like Julia Child and scenes from Disney's Ratatouille took over this book. Also, I wanted to know the husbands secret so badly and the author strung me along, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't work for me.

Thank you NetGalley and Henry Holt and Co. for this digital ARC.

Ooh Piglet… where to begin with this one!

Okay, let’s start with the positives: Piglet is an engaging read, I found myself wanting to return to this novel, and so curious to find out what the main character’s husband’s betrayal was. The writing style is engaging and I especially loved the food descriptions, which seems to be something that resonated with many other readers as well. I enjoyed the supporting characters- Piglet’s family felt real and fully formed. Her best friend Margot felt maybe a little less so, but she was an angel who fully supported Piglet, even when Piglet didn’t deserve it, so I could overlook that.

Now what didn’t work for me. We learn early on that Piglet’s husband-to-be has betrayed her in some massive, life-altering way. It’s hinted at again and again. And this is a little bit of a spoiler alert…


But no, we never actually learn what he did. Some readers may argue, Does it really matter what he did, since we know he betrayed her trust? A betrayal is a betrayal, does it really hurt the novel that we don’t find out what it was?

And my response to this is yes, it did hurt the novel. It felt almost lazy of the author to leave out the most crucial bit of information, like she couldn’t come up with something shattering enough to include. I’m sure this isn’t the case, and the author knows what this supposed betrayal is- but why can’t the readers be privy to that information as well? I felt like such a huge chunk of missing information did this novel a huge disservice. It’s assumed he cheated on her- but I felt like we really needed to see that conversation in order to understand Piglet’s mindset going forward. Why would her fiancé tell his parents what he did, and why would Piglet tell various family members and her best friend- but we as the readers don’t get to know? I can understand why some readers would say it doesn’t matter, but it did to me. For one, I’m nosy, and for two, I think this would have added so much more to the novel.

I was also a bit confused by the way Piglet’s eating disorder was handled. I wanted more exploration of this subject but it seemed almost secondary to the intrigue about what her fiancé did. Yes, it was clear and understandable that her fiancé’s actions had exacerbated her issues but it seems like Piglet’s issues were hidden from the reader for the majority of the book, only to rear up towards the end in full force; in this way the story felt a little bit unbalanced- like a meal missing a necessary ingredient.

The whole wedding scene was fabulous though- I fully enjoyed the mess of it all, though again I thought the author should have really gone all out and let the reader finally find out what her fiancé had done, during at the wedding. The entire book I felt like we were waiting for some huge shocking revelation- but we just never got it. Overall, I gave this one 3 stars. I felt it had so much potential but never really got to where I wanted it to go.

There is a lot of salacious food talk here so take that as my trigger warning and do not read Piglet on an empty stomach. Piglet’s journey is unique and compelling. There is some dark humor and also some tense moments that keep you turning the pages. I love a good character study and this one was original and clever.

Reading “Piglet” felt like being fused with someone else’s brain. I felt the story in my body, related to it on a deeper level, and simply couldn’t get enough.

The narration style and skillful prose guided me through a vibrant world as seen through Piglet’s current experiences, her past hopes and dreams, and her childhood. I was entranced by her thought processes (and also occasionally frustrated by them). Tantalizing glimpses into her childhood offered up reasons as to why grew into the person she did, but never the full story. In fact, I often felt that there was something happening just out of reach, just off the page, and I kept picking the book up throughout the day searching for whatever that may be.

Highly recommend!

•Plot: 3/5 (A young woman deals with a confession from her fiancé in the run up to their wedding.)

•Characters: 4/5 (You’re going to love Piglet’s sister, mom, and Darren; every girl needs a friend like Margot; and you will hate her in laws.)

•Writing: 4/5 (This writing is brutal and honest…however, there is a MAJOR plot point that is never revealed and it drove me crazy.)

•Ending: 3/5

This one was a lot of fun and also made me very uncomfortable while reading. The writing is just unflinchingly honest- it reminded me of an Ashley Audrain book (which is a compliment). The food descriptions are next level and I spent the entirety of the book craving a baguette. Special thanks to the author and Henry Holt & Company for my ARC.

Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt for this ARC! This is a special one—definitely among the most stunning novels I've read in the past few years.

Piglet is an engrossing character who neighbors closely to Fleabag territory: she's insatiable, desperate, and all too faithful to her farces. The biggest fallacy of all is, of course, her impending marriage, and the concept of their relationship only proves harder and harder to reconcile with her emotional reality. As the chapters count down the days to the scrupulous event, you can't help but rubberneck at the subconscious, nearly inevitable wreckage that ensues.

These developments are less of a character falling from grace and more so a woman who resigns herself to the realizations of her performance. Repeatedly, Piglet finds herself mentally disconnected from the social musings of her workplace, her best friend's conflation with motherhood, the differing demands from her bumpkin family versus her fiancé's posh parents. All in all, this is a story about boxes—the ones we pray to tick off, the ones we die squeezing into.

Amidst the scintillating prose ("She swallowed: a child taking medicine, a communicant receiving the Eucharist") lays a table feast of luscious food descriptions ("There would be jazz music, cigarettes smoked on the patio, and a dessert made from one of the new cookbooks she was editing: an espresso semifreddo with warm caramel sauce and glinting shards of praline"). Every word goes down like liquid.

Fans of Sally Rooney will enjoy this character-driven story and its exploration of performative commitment, self-sabotage, and family dynamics. Fans of Hanya Yanagihara will rejoice at the gorgeous prose that allows "Piglet" to be unputdownable.

Honorable mentions to some of my favorite excerpts from this book:

- "Now, they did not kiss over the colanders, the cooling racks, as she had once imagined they would, but Kit asked questions, playing the attentive husband in front of the cashier. She picked up piping bags, stainless-steel nozzles, and leaf gold, and he paid; he carried their bags to the train. If this is what their life was to be, perhaps she could stomach it."
- "She was going to waste, she feared, she knew, the life she had made spoiling around her, turning to rot."
- "As they entered the church, she felt the urge to submit—let it happen, let herself be guided forward; behave nicely, as expected, like the flower girls: sugar, spice, and subordination."
- "[S]he had built a life that relied on the mirrors of others?"

This book is quite delicious and it will make your mouth water! Beyond the food porn though is a deeper story of family relationships and a cast of interesting characters. I felt like I was right there with Piglet in her new home getting to experience all that the author wrote about her life. What a main character! This is a story that will remain with me. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. Five stars.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to read this book early! I really enjoyed it. I thought the writing was very well done, and the story kept me interested. I believe my students/patrons would also love this book and will be acquiring it for the library!

I wanted to love this, and I'll start by saying it's a great premise, but... it fell short for me. Our MC's motives don't feel clear, and some of the commentary felt a bit on the nose. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not! Ultimately not for me. Good writing overall, but not a book I'd pick up again

I truly engaging at super weird experience of a novel. I recommend it to anybody who wants to get to read something a little bit different.

This was such a quirky, unique and well written novel. It is the story about a woman who loved eating so much as a child she was given the nickname Piglet. Now, as an adult, her nickname has stuck even though she has curbed her eating and is leading a dream life with her fiancé Kit. With two weeks out til the wedding day, Piglet is excited and feels that nothing could go wrong to stop her from reaching her goals. That is, until her fiancé shares a secret with her about himself that leaves her devastated and doubting everything about her future husband. Can she brush it under the rug and move forward or will this secret eat her alive. As the story progresses, Piglet slowly begins to lose control of her perfectly ordered life. She self sabotages as her voracious appetite takes over. Will she make it to the big day? Or will Kit’s revelation destroy all hopes for their happiness. I could not put this novel down! This was a solid 5 star read for me.

Thank you @netgalley for the Advanced Readers Copy. Piglet by Lottie Hazell is the story of a woman who was nicknamed Piglet by her family when she was a young girl-she ate a lot, and we find out more about why partway through the story. The nickname stuck. She is now successful, an amazing and creative cook, and about to be married. Things seem perfect, until 13 days before the wedding, her fiancé confesses a terrible secret that threatens their relationship. Piglet finds her whole persona shattered, and has a hunger that she can’t eat enough to fulfill. She keeps moving forward toward the wedding, but things are not good. I had a hard time with this book, it was so hard to watch what Piglet was going through, and live through it with her. #piglet #lottiehazell #advancedreaderscopy #netgalley #debutnovel #bookstagram #booklover #reader #bookblog #lovetoread #fictionreader #bookreview #bookrecommendation #readersofinstagram #bookloversofinstagram #takeapagefrommybook #readallthebooks #booksbooksbooks #booksofinstagram #bookwormproblems #bookaholic #booknerd #whattoread #readingtime #bookaddict #ilovetoread #ilovebooks #needtoread #readallday

Piglet has always been a big eater. Embracing what was perhaps seen as a childhood quirk--even earning her the nickname Piglet--she is climbing the ranks at a cookbook publishing house, a hobby culinarian, and 98 days from marrying the love of her life, Kit, and his well-to-do Oxford family. Two weeks before the wedding, Kit makes a destabilizing admission to Pig. As the wedding inches closer, we are privy to Pig's appetite for a stable, respectable life, and the chasm inside her grows larger.

Piglet is somewhat a classic will-they-won't-they story but is made infinitely more interesting by Hazell's treatment of Pig's relationship with food, image, and acceptance. Kit's indiscretion is assumed but is never explicitly stated, which is a testament to just how much this story is about Pig and herself and not at all about her need for a man. I also commend Hazell for writing a novel of such tidy length--it is exactly what it needs to be.