A review by soph_leman
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

Groff is a talented writer, but I was disappointed that in Fates and Furies, the reader must wade through (and risk drowning in) near-constant fatphobia to get to the book’s merit. Groff uses descriptions of fatness to communicate a character’s inferiority, moral degradation or pitiable state. Frequent descriptions of the protagonists’ thinness ran alongside this. It was distracting to the point where I wondered if an obsession with body mass was an intentional theme of the book. (It’s not). I would have expected better of Groff, as I loved her most recent novel,The Vaster Wilds, where this stuff isn’t an issue. Hopefully her editors said something and she no longer relies on body size as primary method of characterisation.
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