A review by salimah
Piglet by Lottie Hazell

challenging dark emotional reflective tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I am not sure what this book's thesis is. Is it that a woman in a larger body, who is identified solely by the size of that body (and her love of consumption)--to the point that her actual name isn't given until the very end of the story--only has one reaction to devastation, which is to consume to the point of unraveling?

Is it that the characteristic of gluttony, foisted on her by a set of circumstances in which she was protecting/enabling someone else's disordered eating, is so ingrained, so indelible, that another person's actions cause her to regress to the most cliched version of self-sabotage?

I don't know. . . it's not that this kind of thing could never happen or does not happen. I just feel like we've all read/seen this oversimplified version of this story before and nothing new has been brought to the table, so to speak.

And is food the the villain of this story or its hero or both?

And why, why, why not detail the betrayal that sets off this chain reaction of binging and stuffing and public humiliation? The author does not serve her story by holding it back as it could only realistically be one thing (or one-thing adjacent). Rather self-indulgent, no pun intended.