For Young people, Adults
The next book to be featured on the Zoe Ball Radio 2 Book Club will be Big Girl, the beautiful and powerful debut novel by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan.
We have 10 copies to give away to one lucky reading group.
To apply, please log in and email through the link below before Friday 28 July, telling us why your group would like to win.
Not yet a member of Reading Groups for Everyone? Sign up now.
Big Girl
Malaya Clondon hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings in the church’s stuffy basement community center. A quietly inquisitive eight-year-old struggling to suppress her insatiable longing, she would much rather paint alone in her bedroom, or sneak out with her father for a sampling of Harlem’s forbidden street foods.
For Malaya, the pressures of going to a predominantly white Upper East Side prep school are compounded by the high expectations passed down over generations from her sharp-tongued grandmother and her mother, Nyela, a painfully proper professor struggling to earn tenure at a prestigious university. But their relentless prescriptions – fad diets of cottage-cheese and sugar-free Jell-O, high-cardio African dance classes, endless doctors’ appointments – don’t work on Malaya.
As Malaya comes of age in a rapidly gentrifying 1990s Harlem, she strains to understand “ladyness” and fit neatly within the suffocating confines of a so-called “femininity” that holds no room for her body. She finds solace in the lyrical riffs of Biggie Smalls and Aaliyah, and in the support of her sensitive father, Percy; still, tensions at home mount as rapidly as Malaya’s weight. Nothing seems to help – until a family tragedy forces her to finally face the source of her hunger on her own terms.
