13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad

Such an odd title is an eye-catcher and intrigues you from the beginning. When my boyfriend saw this in my box of Barnes and Noble purchases, he had mixed emotions as well. At first he felt sad and wanted to console me because he thought it was a depressingly titled self-help book. Fortunately, that is not the case.

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is a stream of conscious story of a young woman, named Elizabeth. She is on a mission similar to many other people: to find herself and to find happiness.

In some ways, Elizabeth is every woman. At some point in your life, you experience something similar to what she has. She explores every opportunity she can to find happiness. She explores her sexuality, weight loss/gain, and even her name. Throughout the course of the book, Elizabeth goes by Lizzie, Liz, Beth, and the full name Elizabeth. If you can relate to nothing else in the book, the name changes are probably the one you can. A name is so much of who you are. Each of Elizabeth's names represents a different point in her life. Like many other people, one is the name from childhood, representing innocence and naivety. One is of sophistication as you are finding your career and aiming to be, what you consider to be, an "adult." And there are many other stages in between.

Another thing I like about this book is it never specifies how overweight or underweight Elizabeth is. She could literally be any woman. Awad is ambiguous when describing her characters, most of the time. She could be very overweight or just slightly overweight or she may not be overweight at all, but (like many of us) she is never happy with herself and sees herself as fat. This flexibility lets you see yourself in her.

Unfortunately, that is as good as it gets. While the book does cover a journey, it covers it very sparsely. It is like reading the book version of connect the dots where the reader has to do the connecting. And, honestly, there are a lot of dots still left unconnected. It is hard to feel anything for most of the characters. Elizabeth goes through a turmoil marriage and I couldn't really root for or against a divorce. You don't get enough information to be attached to the couple so I just read right through without batting an eye.

Even Elizabeth is hard to connect to. You see her in spurts at different points in her life; at some points, she doesn't even seem like the same person. I could sympathize with her because a couple of these things are things I have felt or done. But I can't say I ever liked her character or felt invested in her story.

Because we only get these flashes and glimpses of Elizabeth's story, the plot line is very thin. So thin that at the end of the book, it doesn't even seem like the end. There was no climax, no real conflict and, therefore, no real conflict resolution. I don't know about you readers, but when the plot is that thin, it is a deal breaker.

At the end of the day, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl was a bust. I was very disappointed. The characters were flat and nearly impossible to connect with and the plot was almost nonexistent. I will have to rate this book a D.

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