Review of the Day: Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Malaya is an academically gifted old African American teenager living in Harlem in the 1990s who also weighs more than 400 pounds. That weight makes her morbidly obese and is the central theme of the novel. While I did feel that Sullivan’s book felt too much like a first novel with a little too much drama and an undeserved happy ending, I thought it was well written and, to paraphrase Tolstoy, the story gave me an emotional inflection by making me feel the experiences Malaya had with food and how it affected her body and how others viewed her.

Here are a few passages that stood out:

Malaya closed her eyes and dug into the jar again. She scrunched her face and spooned more peanut butter into her mouth, then more and more, until the paste felt thick and solid in her throat. She imagined herself shrinking, folding and hardening inch by inch until she could become the spoon and plunge deep into the soft, sweet brown. She saw herself stuck there, tight, small, surrounded, eventually falling still (p. 31).

She tried again, six times, until she couldn’t take the pain around her middle anymore. Then she breathed in and let the denim fall, wishing she could suck up her skin, her fat, her muscle, and whatever it was that lay underneath those things, making her who she was: this person in this body, wedged between the too-tight walls of the Big and Tall men’s section, wishing more than anything to feel small, and slight, and, somehow, like a girl (p. 110).

Malaya lowered herself slowly to the booth seat and sucked in. She prayed the seat would hold her, that it was somehow stronger than all the others she’d broken. She held in her stomach, tensed her thighs, tried not to breathe (p. 236).

Men’s attention and approval were borrowed gifts she was no longer sure she wanted. If they were tied to weight—and it was clear they were—she would have to continue losing weight to keep them (p. 252).

kindle and LibroFM audiobook. 277 pgs. 18 February 2026.