Pizza Girl
Ratings56
Average rating3.5
LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST • An audacious and wryly funny coming-of-age story about a pregnant pizza delivery girl who becomes obsessed with one of her customers. Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial. She's grieving the death of her father, avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future. Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighborhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickled-covered pizzas for her son's happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other toward middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways.
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A lot of the bad reviews here are about how the protagonist is unlikable, or that there doesn't really seem to be a “point” to this book, but the way that Jean Kyoung Frazier writes about people feeling complicated, messy emotions and doing things that even they don't really know WHY they're doing is heartfelt and empathetic. There aren't any easy answers or explanations, but I never felt the way that things developed was nonsensical or just completely out-of-nowhere.
To me, this book nails the experience of sabotaging your own life without even really knowing why—as if you're watching your life go off the rails from the sidelines without being able to stop it. This isn't something everyone will enjoy or connect to emotionally, and that's okay. It's a book about complex people behaving in sometimes shitty ways as they try to figure out how to cope with the lives they're living, and I think it's quite a good one.
The cover promised a Korean-sounding Sally Rooney. It did have that typical detached voice and laconic style, but it was also completely bonkers in a way that was actually interesting.
Some clunkiness at times but also a lot of nuance to the main character and her relationships. A quick and worthwhile read.
