Lisa Renee Pitts delivers a spirited narration of this coming-of-age debut. Malaya Clondon is a young Black girl growing up in Harlem in the ‘80s and ‘90s who faces continual fat shaming. At age 8, she is forced to attend Weight Watchers with her mother, and she suffers harsh judgments and pressures at school, as well as from her hypercritical grandmother. In contrast, Malaya’s father shows her tenderness and support. In tense family scenes, Pitts’s performance stands out. Her energy and expressiveness capture the raw emotions of the characters, helping to keep listeners engaged. However, the story’s incessant fat phobia, which spans decades, can make the listening experience challenging. Overall, a skillfully voiced portrait of complex characters and relationships. V.T.M. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Big Girl: A Novel
Narrated by Lisa Reneé Pitts
Mecca Jamilah SullivanUnabridged — 12 hours, 4 minutes
Big Girl: A Novel
Narrated by Lisa Reneé Pitts
Mecca Jamilah SullivanUnabridged — 12 hours, 4 minutes
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Overview
In her highly anticipated debut novel, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan explores the perils-and undeniable beauty-of insatiable longing.
Growing up in a rapidly changing Harlem, eight-year-old Malaya hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings; she'd rather paint alone in her bedroom or enjoy forbidden street foods with her father. For Malaya, the pressures of her predominantly white Upper East Side prep school are relentless, as are the expectations passed down from her painfully proper mother and sharp-tongued grandmother. As she comes of age in the 1990s, she finds solace in the music of Biggie Smalls and Aaliyah, but her weight continues to climb-until a family tragedy forces her to face the source of her hunger, ultimately shattering her inherited stigmas surrounding women's bodies, and embracing her own desire. Written with vibrant lyricism shot through with tenderness, Big Girl announces Sullivan as an urgent and vital voice in contemporary fiction.
Editorial Reviews
★ 05/30/2022
Sullivan (the collection Blue Talk and Love) charms in her stunning debut novel about a Black girl’s coming-of-age. While growing up in gentrifying Harlem during the 1980s and ’90s, Malaya Clondon is irrevocably impacted by other people’s perceptions and judgments of her weight. At eight, her mother, Nyela forces her to attend Nyela’s Weight Watchers meetings, and she endures cruel remarks from classmates at her predominantly white school. When she’s 16, Nyela and Malaya’s father, Percy, fight over the prospect of Malaya undergoing a gastric bypass. Throughout, Sullivan offers a nuanced portrayal of Malaya’s difficulties in navigating a world in which other people are unable to see her beyond her size, even after a terrible loss shakes Malaya’s world and reorients her family. All of Sullivan’s characters—even the cruel ones—brim with humanity, and the author shines when conveying the details of Malaya’s comforts, such as Biggie Smalls lyrics, the portraits she paints in her room, the colors she braids into her hair, and the sweet-smelling dulce de coco candies she eats with a classmate with whom she shares a close and sexually charged friendship. This is a treasure. Agent: Janet Silver, Aevitas Creative Management. (July)
"[Big Girl is] a painful, intimate, and ultimately celebratory book about one girl’s determination to claim space. What’s especially breathtaking is the way Sullivan writes about queerness as reprieve and refugee. It is through moments of queer love and desire that Malaya begins to imagine a life lived on her own terms."
"I loved Malaya because I love stories about girls pushing back against societal expectations. This novel is about so many things—gentrification, intergenerational trauma, Black womanhood, love in all forms—but it’s Sullivan’s heart-rending observations about her character’s sense of disconnect in her body that kept a lump in my throat."
"Bountiful and biting, Sullivan’s debut is a crucial meditation on indulgence, identity, and inheritance, a story for those whose desire for self-determination and bodily autonomy cannot be satiated by the rations of a rapacious world."
"In Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s achingly beautiful coming-of-age debut novel, Big Girl, this body carries the weight of an entire neighborhood.... Big Girl triumphs as a love letter to the Black girls who are forced to enter womanhood too early — and to a version of Harlem that no longer exists. In this novel, gentrification means a violent thinning of the true beauty of Black and immigrant cultures and tightknit communities that have been nearly erased in service of commercialism and whiteness."
"Big Girl... is as bighearted and as celebratory as a work can be. Set in Harlem’s “indominable largesse” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this is a book of big appetites, big feelings, big questions (“What else might a woman turn out to be?”), Biggie Smalls, big desires. Sullivan writes joyfully about bodies, the city, youth, culture, music, extended family, and food, describing them all with vivid, carnal detail. Against this backdrop, she unflinchingly examines what we do to Black girls and women: how even our best intentions squeeze them into small shapes."
"Can something be both a love letter and a take-down? Big Girl is that: a love letter to 90s culture (shout-out to Biggie Smalls and Aaliyah) and a take-down of 90s culture (looking at you, Weight Watchers) . . . a coming-of-age story with a capacious lens. For readers interested in a sharp look at Black womanhood, 90s Harlem, and the toxicity of body shame, Big Girl is a sure bet."
"Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s debut novel weaves Malaya’s joyful friendships and discovery of hip-hop with a measured look at the injuries and shame passed down through generations."
[An] achingly beautiful coming-of-age debut novel."
Lisa Renee Pitts delivers a spirited narration of this coming-of-age debut…Her energy and expressiveness capture the raw emotions of the characters, helping to keep listeners engaged…A skillfully voiced portrait of complex characters and relationships.”
12/01/2022
The melodious voice of the narrator Lisa Reneé Pitts eases listeners into 1990s Harlem, where eight-year-old Malaya is going to a weight-loss meeting with her mother. Malaya's weight dictates the way others think of her and treat her, but she doesn't let that limit her own outlook and possibilities. Listeners travel along with her until she's 18 years old, as her parents fight with each other, her grandmother berates her, romantic relationships go wrong, and friendships wax and wane. Pitts inhabits each character, bringing authentic emotions and accents as needed. Sullivan describes the luscious foods that Malaya wants, as well as the bland diet foods that she does not. Her depiction of shame-filled eating disorder behaviors is heartbreaking. This book is not an easy listen, as it is difficult to hear how others focus only on Malaya's weight, when there is so much more to this strong, bright girl. While cataloged for adults, Sullivan's affecting debut may also resonate with teenagers, despite the 1990s references. VERDICT An ultimately hopeful book with a top-tier narrator that does not disappoint.—Laura Stein
02/01/2022
A Lambda Literary Award winner for her collection Blue Talk and Love, Sullivan offers full-length fiction featuring eight-year-old Harlemite Malaya, who's resistant to her prim mother's efforts to send her to Weight Watchers; she'd rather be painting in her room or indulging in street food with her dad. She must also cope with fierce pressures at her mostly white Upper East Side prep school. Eventually, family tragedy makes her rethink the source of her hunger and face down stigmas about women's bodies.
Lisa Renee Pitts delivers a spirited narration of this coming-of-age debut. Malaya Clondon is a young Black girl growing up in Harlem in the ‘80s and ‘90s who faces continual fat shaming. At age 8, she is forced to attend Weight Watchers with her mother, and she suffers harsh judgments and pressures at school, as well as from her hypercritical grandmother. In contrast, Malaya’s father shows her tenderness and support. In tense family scenes, Pitts’s performance stands out. Her energy and expressiveness capture the raw emotions of the characters, helping to keep listeners engaged. However, the story’s incessant fat phobia, which spans decades, can make the listening experience challenging. Overall, a skillfully voiced portrait of complex characters and relationships. V.T.M. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
2022-04-27
In this debut novel set in 1990s Harlem, a young girl learns—and redefines—what it means to take up space.
Eight-year-old Malaya Clondon weighs 168 pounds. It’s also true that she is Black, that her family recently moved from a tiny apartment on the Lower East Side to a brownstone uptown, and that she attends Galton Elementary Academy for the Gifted, but her weight seems to be the most important fact about her to most of the people around her. It’s what her classmates see. It’s what leads her mother, Nyela, to monitor Malaya’s food and take her to Weight Watchers meetings. And it’s what prompts her grandmother Ma-Mère to suggest that Malaya get gastric bypass surgery. Only a couple of close friends and Malaya’s father recognize that there is more to her than a number on a scale and unruly desires. By high school, she will have a larger circle of friends. She finds solace and joy in the rhymes of Biggie Smalls. And she discovers a new sense of style as she builds a wardrobe inspired by the rappers she sees on MTV. But she still hungers for experiences that she believes are reserved for thin girls—a hunger that becomes more complex when her best friend, Shaniece, becomes a thin girl herself. In an effort to meet this need, Malaya will acquiesce to sexual experiences that bring her no pleasure, just a hint of what it feels like to be wanted, before she begins to explore what it truly is that she, herself, wants. Sullivan writes with tenderness and uses the language of poetry to communicate her protagonist’s inner life. In difficult moments, Malaya escapes into fantasy, and she uses drawing and painting as emotional outlets. But what begins as dissociation evolves into a more confident relationship with her art, just as Malaya will ultimately learn to inhabit her body with a sense of license and possibility. She decides to let go of the shame Ma-Mère passed on to Nyela, and Nyela passed on to Malaya, and not measure herself in terms of fatness and thinness but in terms of “the smallness of a body against a broad scape of mountains” and “the smallness of life in the big, busy world.”
A lyrical and important coming-of-age novel.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940174814943 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HighBridge Company |
| Publication date: | 07/26/2022 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 1,066,316 |
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