Dumplin' by Julie MurphyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Dumplin' focuses on sixteen year old Willowdean Dixon. Willowdean lives with her mother (a former Miss Teen Blue Bonnet), she has a job at the local fast food joint where she works with her crush, Bo. For whatever reason, Will can't bring herself to tell her best friend, Ellen, about the growing relationship between her and Bo, even as the two begin a sort of summer romance.
Thankfully, the novel isn't completely focused on Will and Bo. The protagonist deals with the loss of her aunt, her mom's repeated involvement (and the town's fixation) on The Miss Blue Bonnet pageant, her changing relationship with her best friend, and body image. A combination of these pushes Will to enter the local pageant, and surprisingly, that's a small percent of the book. Considering how much of the marketing is 'fat girl enters a beauty pageant!', I really assumed Will would be getting into it much earlier in the book and that it would play a bigger part. I'm grateful that this wasn't a book about a social reject showing everyone that she was beautiful on the inside, or winning the love of a conventionally attractive boy. I really think that Julie Murphy made Will a believable teenage girl. Sometimes it frustrated me, but that's a good thing. I think more often than not stories about fat girls make us into people who have the singular fault of not being conventionally attractive. Julie Murphy told it like it is, making this a wonderful and refreshing read.
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