Big Girl (2022) by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Big Girl (2022)

by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

New York:  22/105

Harlem: 1/14

  The Audiobook listens run geographically ahead of the books, since fewer titles are Audiobooks.  Here we are in Harlem, the second New York borough to hit and the third sub-area of New York/New Jersey.  Like the other areas, Harlem could itself be a whole state, a small one.   I'm expecting that all of these books except maybe for one (Spanish Harlem) are going to be written by African-American authors, since Harlem is the unquestioned literary capital of Black America and part of the New York City, which is, by virtue of population size and location of the publishing industry, the unquestioned literary capital of the United States.

   

   Big Girl is the exception to all my complaints about YA type titles where the protagonist/narrator is a young woman who basically spends the whole book in her room, or like, at school, and if anything "real" happens to her its horrific.  You can write that novel any way you want, but I've read enough them at this point, 10 percent through the 1,001 Novels project, that 90% of these books are all the same, with only the ethnic background, socioeconomic status and geography changed.

  Big Girl is that other 10 percent- and these are books that genuinely open my eyes to a new perspective I hadn't given serious thought.  Here, it's the inner life of a morbidly obese high school student, the child of two African-American Yuppie/Professional parents who inhabit a refurbished brownstone in 1990's Manhattan.  Big Girl also has a strong theme of love for the pre-gentrification, now-vanished Harlem of that era, and I found both themes engaging.  Sullivan handles her subject with grace and dignity and does a fantastic job of getting inside the world of a morbidly obese teenager. 

  A