This book was different. I think in a good way? It’s not necessarily a style I want to read more books in, but for this one it made an impact and was unique. The way the author uses primarily descriptions of food to evoke the emotion throughout the book is fascinating. It was a rollercoaster from beginning to end of “oh hey that sounds good” to “I want to puke let me off of this thing.” The nuances and details of the story aren’t there- but I think that was on purpose. The heart of the story is the emotion of piglet and how she tries (or fails) to gain control through food. The details behind what is triggering the behavior is secondary. I wish the characters were more likable.

Lottie Hazell's debut novel, "Piglet," serves up a tantalizing exploration of modern womanhood, appetites, and the courage to forge a new path.
The story revolves around Piglet, an up-and-coming cookbook editor in London, leading what appears to be an idyllic life. She has a loving fiancé, Kit, and a close-knit group of friends who adore her culinary skills. Piglet's talent for crafting exquisite meals has become her trademark, endearing her to Kit and his eccentric upper-class family.
Two weeks before their wedding, Kit reveals a devastating betrayal, shaking Piglet's world to its core. Yet, in a surprising turn of events, they choose to proceed with their wedding plans, setting the stage for an emotionally charged narrative.
As the wedding day approaches, Piglet grapples with mounting pressures at work, her family's expectations, and her relentless pursuit of the perfect wedding cake. Hazell skillfully portrays Piglet's internal turmoil and her growing sense of disquiet, rendering her character profoundly relatable.
What sets "Piglet" apart is its incisive critique of societal norms and the unrealistic standards imposed on brides-to-be. Piglet's journey from conformity to self-discovery is marked by moments of doubt and bold choices that challenge convention, making her character endearing and empowering.
In conclusion, "Piglet" is a captivating literary experience that leaves readers hungry for more. Hazell's debut is a must-read for those seeking a fresh perspective on the complexities of modern life, making it clear that she is a talent to watch in the world of literatur

Ninety-eight days before the wedding, already installed in their Oxford home, Kit proposed a toast to Piglet, his WTB (wife to be). "to my good fortune-new home, dear friends, astonishing woman to marry...". Piglet served one of her exquisite dinners complete with dessert. As assistant cookbook editor at Fork House, she chose a dessert featured in one of those cookbooks. She let compliments on her culinary skills "fill and invigorate her".

Kit would tell her thirteen days before their wedding of his indiscretion and deception. Piglet thought her wedding would be "a fusion of images-she and Kit laughing, embracing...but now there were some things you could not tell your friends. She knew that truths, once spoken, had the power to strip her of the life she had so carefully built..." She filled the opening chasm the only way she knew how, a hunger satisfied by binge eating, a way to fill her inner void.

Would marrying Kit satisfy Piglet's needs? It seemed so, initially, as she pursued a different hunger, one of upward mobility and greed. Middle class life in Derby would now be replaced by upscale Oxford, in a new home purchased and supplemented by Kit's parents. Kit's parents would pay all wedding expenses and bankroll the honeymoon in the family owned chalet in France. "Marriage is a commitment: You'll make a good wife," said Kit's mum.

Thirteen days to go! Piglet's "industriousness, her private productivity" started to unravel as the impact of Kit's betrayal became known. Earmarked for a job promotion, she failed to apply. Her friendship with bestie, Margot would falter as Margot gave birth and the constraints as wife/mother took precedence. The tale of how Piglet got her nickname would be recounted. As an aside, the reader learns that Piglet's binge eating might have developed as a cover for her sister's anorexia.

Knowing what she knows now, would Piglet enter a marriage that "looks good rather than feels good?" The quest for upward mobility must be reached, however, Piglet's hunger can no longer be quenched. It is a hunger of desperation, a search for love and support, a voracious appetite that cannot be suppressed. She craves more and more.

"Piglet" by Lottie Hazell is a character study of a woman with the goal of shedding her middle class roots to climb the ladder of success only to be betrayed and left even more fractured and unsatisfied. Highly recommended.

Thank you Henry Holt & Co. and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The way this book read was very intriguing- it often feels as if piglets thoughts or even just her thought process is very similar to that of our own. It felt like looking into her mind and made it easy to be in her shoes, feel what she felt. When she discovers her fiancé has been cheating on her, the initial reaction to the reader would be to leave him… but piglet stays and with the background given, it almost makes sense why it took her until her wedding day to decide. She had what seemed to be the perfect life, it was what would make people proud of her and think highly of her. But it wasn’t HER they would be proud with - and eventually she realized that. The courage it took for her to move on was great. My main critique of the story would be that there was no further development with her eating disorder. It’s very clearly there and by the end I’m not even sure she realized that she had it. That being such a pivotal part of the story I felt there should have been a bit more discussion on it.

Regardless, this was a thought provoking read and I enjoyed it.

A darkly funny novel about women and their desires - I loved Piglet for all her sins.
Food, class, gender, Waitrose, it’s all here, skewering society.
Five mealy stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt & Company for the eARC.

It’s fair to say that I have never read a book in which the author described food the way Lottie Hazell did in Piglet. Piglet’s relationship with food changes with the plot. At first, you’re like “Man, I wish I could make food like her” but as the plot progresses you’re like “I think she needs to go to therapy”. The way we could understand her emotions through the process of her making the food was astonishing. Especially, when she’s making the wedding cake. Her relationship with food and how it was affected by her emotions was relatable.

I think Miss Hazell did a remarkable job and is a skilful storyteller.

P.S. Why do men have to ruin everything good in life? Honestly, Kit and his family deserved worse than what happened at the wedding.

This remarkable story is told almost entirely through 1) dialogue and 2) descriptions of food. I think it shouldn't work, but it does. I was rapt. The protagonist's attention to food, her relationship with food, her history of covering for her anorexic sister, the class divides between two families, the ambitions of the characters...it's all there, and much more, revealed to us in conversations and also in menu plans, and the relationships between the characters seem deeply complicated and tangled and human. The details of these lives are revealed to us in a breezy style where there is much left up to me as a reader to infer, or to trust in. Maybe a good word for this book is "deft." It's skillfully told, the author is as skillful at storytelling as the protagonist is at cooking up elaborate meals. The writing and storytelling are perfect for a story that is in one way small in scope and in another way is meant to answer a very big question: "why do we live?"...Good.

I don't know what I expected about this book but I got Waitrose, food obsession, Oxford, family drama and dynamics, and a countdown to a wedding. It was more satirical than I was expecting but it was done in an even way. Having the plot hing on Kit's reveal was a brave choice but it worked!

It started in a lighthearted way and then it got depressing and dark very quickly. You never reach a resolution at the end and she was not likeable at the end.


Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

This is a fantastic story about hunger, longing, and truly not knowing what you want. We follow our protagonist, cruelly nicknamed Piglet for her obsession with food, as she decides between the lower class home she came from and the picture perfect one that betrayed her. The long passages of succulent dishes are juxtaposed with the messiness of Piglet's dilemma. Quite honestly, I didn't know I would be enthralled by the culinary descriptions as I'm not much of a foodie, but they were beautifully written and kept me hungry the whole time.

The intro started off a little slow, but I was enamored by the MC. Vivid descriptions of food balanced with life lessons.

4.5/5 stars

There was so much about this book that I enjoyed. The writing—overall, on the prose level—was fabulous; the central character of Piglet was compelling, realistic, and finely drawn. The storytelling structure counted down the days to Piglet’s wedding and I thought that device worked really well, too. The constellation of relationships that Hazell builds around Piglet from the beginning felt immediately absorbing and I was invested in her connections to her friends and family. I also thought that Piglet’s issues with eating—she has what might be called a binge eating disorder—were handled very deftly; Hazell walks the line between showing Piglet’s disordered eating AND that, for her, food is sustaining and vital and central to who she is. By the last line, when she eats “until she was satisfied,” the reader is meant to understand that Piglet is working to find equilibrium in her relationship with food—and with herself. All of these elements came together in a mix that felt subtle, insightful, and poignant.

I also thought the plot of this book largely delivered, no small feat given how much anticipation Hazell builds up re: Piglet’s wedding. The conceit of the central narrative is simple. Thirteen days before their nuptials, Piglet’s fiancé, Kit, reveals that he has cheated on her throughout the whole of their relationship. Hazell is savvy enough to keep the nature of this cheating vague. We don’t even receive confirmation that it IS cheating that Kit unveils to Piglet, although it seems clear from context clues that that is, indeed, what he has done to so badly destabilize their relationship. Will Piglet, herself from a lower-middle-class background, wed the handsome, wealthy fiancé who has utterly betrayed her? The book is driven forward by this question. Particularly in light of Piglet’s class anxieties, it is a compelling question. Put another way, the book asks: what will she put up with to have a life that appears to surpass the horizons she grew up with? Piglet later describes this supposedly better life as one “that looked good rather than felt good” and the paradoxical appeal of such an existence will surely feel relatable to many readers. Nevertheless, Hazell does not idealize Piglet’s more modest upbringing in comparison to her shinier life with Kit. In a painful but realistic choice, Hazell shows how where Piglet comes from is, in many ways, nearly as flawed as where she is.

Weddings—bad and good—are both cliche and classic in literature and Hazell plays with that duality beautifully here. On one hand, Piglet is your classic marriage plot. On the other hand, her story also operates as a kind of urban legend. She is the friend of a friend whose fiancé reveals right before the wedding that he has done XYZ; the bride in a newspaper article who trashes her own wedding and then flees—she embodies a horror story of the middle-class, millennial wedding. The putative happiest day of Piglet’s life is transformed into an emotional, logistical, and physical nightmare. It’s a testament to Hazell’s writing that I wanted to see Piglet through this fever dream—especially when I knew it was coming. The fact that Hazell makes Piglet’s experience ultimately feel moving and real and not absurd is an achievement and shows the care with which she treats her protagonist.

While the core of this book was so well-crafted, there were times when either Hazell (or perhaps an editor!) do not seem to trust the reader to understand Piglet’s story. Each chapter ends with a few italicized sentences that attempt to sum up its emotional heart. These were such a defect in the story that, if I hadn’t otherwise loved the writing, I would have otherwise struggled to get over these bits. These italicized sentences almost feel like an author’s note-to-self that has been left in the text. Regardless of their intended purpose, these sentences suggest that the reader has not understood the chapter and needs to be spoon-fed the moral. It’s oddly 18th century and not in a good way! It gives the entire book a self-help cast that is otherwise not present. I also note that the last line of the book is not italicized and does not fall into the style of these other miniature conclusions. I think that’s telling as to the effectiveness of this device. If these sentences were deleted, the book would be a five-star read for me!

I just reviewed Piglet by Lottie Hazell. #NetGalley

I really enjoyed this book! I LOVED that she waited till her wedding day to tell THE WORLD what he did. 😂

3.5

Lottie Hazel is an awesome food writer- her descriptions of meals was what had me turning each page. I also really was rooting for Piglet. I think this story also excels at being a friendship story, which was the true love story of this book at the end of the day. I really rooted for the main character as well as, Margot any her sister Franny and could picture this being a tv show or movie.

I think the main drawback I had was I wish we could have gotten more time with the Main Character‘s motivations, I think having even more back story as well as insight into what the MC had going on next (post disaster) would have been nice and I think could have provided even more complexities into the relationships that were depicted.

This was a quick and ultimately satisfying reading experience! I don't love food descriptions (I'm vegan and it makes a lot of the content unappealing) and they were copious throughout, but there was food for thought as well! I really appreciated how it approached the subjects of societal pressure and the use of hunger as metaphor, which is a truth for many of us.
3.5

Piglet is a book unlike most I have read. It was a compelling adventure. Piglet, a pet name given to her by her parents, does over eat at times, many times…..but as I’ve gleaned, “it’s not what you’re eating but what’s eating you.’’ Piglet’s parents are good people but simple. They love their daughter but have contibiuated to her eating frenzies, in my opinion. They mean well and do compliment her but also put her down. They lack instinctive support that Piglet is ravenous to obtain, pun intended. It’s both a sad story and an enlightening story, as Piglet does ultimately subscribe to the adage, to thine own self be true. She is an exquisite cook and her dishes, as described, are mouth watering. She seeks kudos and recognition for her culinary endeavors, as a way to boost her self esteem. Unfortunately, a betrayal throws a real dagger into her heart and psyche. This disloyality causes an enormously uncontorlled eating frenzy. My impression is that she will survive. Very well written novel and a unique plot. Thank you NetGalley and Henry Holt and Company for sending this booking for review consideration. All opinions are my own. #Piglet, #NetGalley, #LottieHazell.

as women, the society we exist in refuses to accept that we want to have our cake, and eat it too. our title
character, piglet, is by all appearances a “successful” woman: she’s got a good job that she enjoys as a cookbook editor at a london publisher, two supportive close friends, despite their main focus being on one’s pregnancy, and a dapper loving fiancée, from a well off family that she begrudgingly gets along with. “piglet”, not her real name, is a caught on nickname given to her by her family, reflective of her love of food, meant in “good fun” but it’s deeper meaning becomes increasingly grating as it continues to affect her view of herself, and how much she’s “allowed” to want when she know she deserves more. piglet is two weeks out from her wedding, when suddenly her fiancée, kit, decides to uncover a secret he’s been keeping from her, revealing this duplicitous nature he’s been hiding away, giving piglet an impossible decision to make, of whether to continue on to get married after being lied to, while being given merely two weeks notice. feeling betrayed by her fiancée, unsupported by her pregnant best friend, and avoidant of her sister and her queries for money, piglet becomes deeply hungry, for support, for guidance, but most of all, for food. as things in her personal life quickly spiral out of control, and with no one to truly confide in, piglet relies on her dependent relationship with food to give her something to focus on; unable to satisfy her hunger for the life she always craved, she feeds a different hunger instead. her desperate attempts to fix everything that has been ruined, her suffocation of herself in order to retain a presence of steadiness, this incorrigible hunger she insistingly tries to quell, nothing filling the pit in her stomach; this drama plays out like a powerful symphony reaching its striking crescendo. reading this book gives you the feeling of being alone in a dressing room, sweating, crying, trapped in an outfit that you can’t get off, so stuck that you have convinced yourself you’ll be forced to buy this cage of a garment, have to walk out the dressing room in something that doesn’t fit, all eyes on you, wondering if everyone can tell you are holding your breath to keep the buttons clasped. it feels impossible to fit in the mold made for women in this world while also honoring our appetites, everyone wants us to have this relatable low maintenance appetite, we must stay small, consume only enough to be everything they want us to be, but not an ounce more. we constantly receive criticism on our bodies: you’re too small, eat a burger, you’re too big, go on a diet, not to mention endless comments on our hunger in terms of ambition and desire; when will it ever end? at what point can we begin to trust our own hunger? i think as women we have all been asked damaging questions about our hunger, whether it’s for food or otherwise; you’re going to eat all of that? how can you still be hungry? surely you’re not going to eat more? how can you still want more? it makes you feel as if the only acceptable hunger for a woman in this world is none at all. in piglet, we watch a woman figure out what she craves, what it means to truly honor this hunger, and turn towards what she finds out she needs to fully satisfied, the ingredients to the life she truly deserves. womanhood is it’s own breed of ravenousness, a begging to be fulfilled, and we are tired of being forced to stifle our hunger.

PIGLET is an absolutely captivating novel—I was hooked from start to finish! Piglet is completely content with her life. She holds a dream job as a cookbook editor at a publishing house in London, is happily engaged to handsome, accomplished Kit, has a great group of friends, and just moved into a beautiful new house. But when Kit admits to a shocking betrayal just days before the couple is supposed to be walking down the aisle, everything starts to fall apart. Piglet's life is full of everything she could ever want...but now she's hungry. At first, she's willing to keep up appearances, wrapped up in planning the wedding and clinging to a relationship that has now become a lie, but can you ever be satisfied when you know you deserve so much more? And when the wedding day arrives, what will Piglet choose?

I loved how character-driven this novel was! Piglet is a flawed, messy, complex protagonist, and I was so engaged in her journey and invested in her different relationships, even at times when I found her unlikable. I also thought the descriptions of food were so well-done and immersive, and really enjoyed Hazell's writing style in general. I understand why certain things weren't expanded on as completely as they could have been, and that some aspects of the plot should be somewhat open-ended, leaving readers thinking. However, at the same time, I wished Piglet's history with her eating disorder and how her upbringing shaped her relationship with food had been explored even more. I also wanted to know more about her relationship with Kit. Beyond finding out what he had done (which, admittedly, I was curious about, too!), I wished their relationship had a little more depth, and we got a little more insight into their dynamic and how their relationship got to where it was before the betrayal. Still, I thought PIGLET was a fantastic debut, and a compelling story I'm still thinking about even after turning the final page! I look forward to seeing what Lottie Hazell writes next. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

3.5 stars
This book was well written. It included some amazing food descriptions that honestly made my mouth water. That said, the book also left me with a lot of questions. That isn't always a bad thing, but when one of the major plot points was based on an unknown it made it hard to know what or who I was rooting for. At one point, I even went back and reread earlier chapters to make sure I wasn't missing vital information. 4 stars for writing style, 3 for plot.
Thank you for the ARC.

this book was absolutely incredible. i can’t believe this is hazell’s first novel.
the language hazell used was sharp and to the point, and so intense that at times i was viscerally uncomfortable (in a good way lol). something that i especially liked was how she emphasized how piglet was, at all times, hyper aware of her own body.
piglet and margot’s relationship was also a really beautiful part of the story.
overall this has been one of my favorite reads of the year and i can’t wait for it to release so i can make everyone read it :)