Big Girl
3.4
(202)
Danielle Steel
In this heartfelt, incisive novel, Danielle Steel celebrates the virtues of unconventional beauty while exploring deeply resonant issues of weight, self-image, sisterhood, and family. A chubby little girl with ordinary looks, Victoria Dawson has always felt out of place in her family, especially in body-conscious L.A. While her parents and sister can eat anything and not gain an ounce, Victoria must watch everything she eats, as well as endure her father’s belittling comments about her body and see her academic achievements go unacknowledged. Ice cream and oversized helpings of all the wrong foods give her comfort, but only briefly. The one thing she knows is that she has to get away from home, and after college in Chicago, she moves to New York City. Landing her dream job as a high school teacher, Victoria loves working with her students and wages war on her weight at the gym. Despite tension with her parents, Victoria remains close to her younger sister, Grace. Though they couldn’t be more different in looks, they love each other unconditionally. So when Grace announces her engagement to a man who is an exact replica of their narcissistic father, Victoria worries about her sister’s future happiness, and with no man of her own, she feels like a failure once again. As the wedding draws near, a chance encounter, a deeply upsetting betrayal, and a family confrontation lead to a turning point. Behind Victoria is a lifetime of hurt and neglect she has tried to forget. Ahead is a challenge and a risk: to accept herself as she is, celebrate it, and claim the victories she has fought so hard for and deserves. Big girl or not, she is terrific and discovers that herself.
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"Honestly, I picked this book up at the grocery store based on the cover. The old adage that you can't judge a book by its cover rings true, in this case. It looked like a fun book...couldn't have been further from the truth. I've only read one Danielle Steel book, and that was in high school, so I can't speak to her previous works, but this was terrible. I almost never quit midway through a book, but I couldn't make myself finish this one. And I've never written a review on here, so that should tell you how bad this was. <br/><br/>I am not a huge literary critic, preferring breezy beach reads 80% of the time, so it's not that I was out of my genre on this one. No, the problem with this book lies with the plot, the characters, the pacing, and the writing. At first, I figured the beginning was just setting up for later in the novel, but no, it continued to carry on at that awkward rate, skimming over time like a rock over water. And the way Ms. Steel told us what happened and what the character thought. I've read better "show don't tell" in high school creative writings. <br/><br/>All in all, I couldn't care less about any of the characters, and if I had to hear about how Victoria looked like her fat grandmother one more time, I might have throw the book across the room.<br/><br/>Don't waste your time."
Jamie Mork
"I kept waiting for something to happen but nothing ever did. Even the blurb inside the cover said some kind of scandal would come to light but when it did it took up no more than 3 pages. Not awful but not good either."
Cathy Sears