Big Girl Small
A Novel
-
-
3.8 • 25 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Judy Lohden is your above-average sixteen-year-old—sarcastic and vulnerable, talented and uncertain, full of big dreams for a big future. With a singing voice that can shake an auditorium, she should be the star of Darcy Academy, the local performing arts high school. So why is a girl this promising hiding out in a seedy motel room on the edge of town?
The fact that the national media is on her trail after a controversy that might bring down the whole school could have something to do with it. And that scandal has something—but not everything—to do with the fact that Judy is three feet nine inches tall.
Rachel DeWoskin remembers everything about high school: the auditions (painful), the parents (hovering), the dissection projects (compelling), the friends (outcasts), the boys (crushable), and the girls (complicated), and she lays it all out with a wit and wistfulness that is half Holden Caulfield, half Lee Fiora, Prep's ironic heroine. Big Girl Small is a scathingly funny and moving book about dreams and reality, at once light on its feet and unwaveringly serious.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
DeWoskin's daring third book (and second novel after Repeat After Me) takes on sexual politics, physical beauty, pity, and violence, and succeeds in giving readers a nuanced and provocative treatment without descending into pedantics or hysteria. Bright and sardonic Judy Lohden, a 16-year-old dwarf freshly enrolled in Ann Arbor's Darcy Arts Academy, falls victim to "the worst Steven King Carrie prank in the history of dating" at the hands of popular boy Jeff Legassic, who becomes an object of desire as soon as he and Judy meet cute the first week of school. The book opens with Judy hiding out in a seedy motel; throughout the novel, she slowly unveils her secret and reveals her two visions of herself that of a pretty teenage girl with an hourglass figure who happens to be three feet nine inches tall, and that of a sideshow attraction. It's a rare author who is willing to subject her protagonist to the extreme ranges of degradation and redemption to which DeWoskin subjects Judy; thankfully, she manages it beautifully.
Customer Reviews
Smart and funny... Couldn't put it down!
Judy is such a great narrator and character! I fell in love with her and the author as well but was kind of disturbed to see that she thanked Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in her acknowledgements.... It made me suddenly sad when I read that.
Not Sure
Good read but wondering how a sixteen year old girl has the inner thoughts of a grown, wise woman. At times I felt as though the thoughts of 16 year old Judy were those of the writer, of someone who has had the opportunity to interject with a different type of reason. I wasn't totally convinced that Judy was that clever or balanced. In that respect, however, the author caught it before it became too obvious. While I applaud the reality of Rachel's mother's tenacity in a set of cruel circumstances, the book was still written by someone other than Judy. As a memoirist, I found this to be slightly off.