Pizza Girl

Written By Linda Malek

Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier

Reviewed by Omma
📒📒

If you like off-beat books with a complicated and dysfunctional heroine, this may be the book for you. However, it wasn’t for me.

The fact that I didn’t notice that Pizza girl remains unnamed until the end shows how unengaged I was.

It’s about an 18-year old pregnant girl who works in a Pizza place. She has a loving bf Billy and a doting mother but she’s still coming to terms with the death of her alcoholic father and she appears depressed. Until she meets Jenny. A middle-aged woman who has moved to the area and orders pickled pizzas for her young son Adam.

Their unlikely friendship and Pizza girl’s infatuation/obsession comes across random and unnatural.

Pizza girl is scared about becoming a mother, has no plan for her future, has no real friends and can’t seem to appreciate her boyfriend or mum but constantly thinks about her abusive father who died in a car crash while drunk.

The end was slightly redeeming and she develops more depth and maturity but overall I can’t say I’d recommend this even though I’ll admit it was well written.

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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