This is a quick MG read focused on issues of body image, inter generational trauma, and fitting in. Yasmin is a relatively recent immigrant to the US from Iran who is regularly othered by cruel classmates because of her heritage, curly hair, thick eyebrows, and weight. However she also faces consistent othering at home, where her mother constantly harasses her about her weight, refusing to stop even when her husband and son express concerns (but don't actually stop the behavior, which was frustrating if realistic). While I appreciated that the author included a scene wherein the mother almost immediately relapses into her bullying behavior after seeming to realize the harm she is causing (which, again, was frustrating but realistic) the entire plot feels a bit too neatly wrapped up in the end. This might have been the result of trying to cram so much into a relatively short book.

This book shows more about body image, relationships with a family member, friendship, and embracing that true self. Yasmin struggles with her weight. Her mother encouraged her to lose weight in order to fit in a blue dress and other things. Yasmin wants her mother to be like her best friend’s mother. She was also bullied for the way she looked. Later on in the book Yasmin wants to feel better than ever by changing the way she looks.

When you write a semi-autobiographical book, you tear your heart out and place it for the world to see, but sometimes that is the best way to get your story across. In this debut novel, the author takes a bit of her own adolescence and combines it into this fictional middle grade story of a girl trying to please her mother by losing weight.

Yasmin has gained weight since reaching puberty, and her mother, who was mocked for being too fat, and starved herself as a young woman, in Iran, doesn’t want to have this happen to her daughter. She must be thin, and beautiful, so she can have the same happy life that she has had. Yasmin doesn’t know any of this, just that her mother is happiest when she loses weight, and she wants to please her mother.

The blue dress, that this book is named for, is a dress that her mother sewed for Yasmin, but purposely made a size to small to encourage her to lose weight. It is the most beautiful dress that Yasmin has ever seen, but she simply can’t lose enough weight to fit into it, no matter how hard she tries. She skips meals. She throws up if she feels she has eaten too much. And she is miserable. On ttop of that, some white girls are making fun of her unibrow, and her curly hair.

Yasmin thinks if she can be thin and have straight hair, and wear makeup, that she can be like the cool girls, and life will be easier. And you can see this coming a mile away, that that isn't how life works. And the girls she thinks she has made friends with, the cool girls, are still mean to her, in the name of “just joking”, until the jokes hurt too much to be ignored.

This book had me in tears. There are mothers out there that think making their daughters thin will solve all their problems. They do it out of a warped sense of love.

Very down to earth, well written book. You can tell the author went through what her main character did, because it is so true to life, all the way down to hiding snacks under the bed, so that she can eat in private.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review. This book is being published the 24th of March 2026.