Pizza Girl is 18 years old, preggers and working at a pizza shop. Then she meets Jenny, a middle-aged mom with a son who will only eat pizza with pickles on. And so begins a strange friendship…
… yeah I didn’t like Jean Kyoung Frazier’s debut novel Pizza Girl. The blurb comparing it to Normal People makes me laugh - I don’t think the marketing team for this book read Sally Rooney’s novel because there is no similarity whatsoever, they just saw her sales figures and are trying to make that happen for this!
Almost nothing occurs in the book. Pizza Girl gets obsessed with Jenny for no real reason - I guess she finds out that she’s gay or bi-sexual at least? But that relationship doesn’t go anywhere, it’s never developed and little else happens. She ignores her loving boyfriend Billy (who really deserves better) and she’s generally depressed - her life isn’t going anywhere, she doesn’t know what she wants to do, she’s not ready to be a mother, and she’s still coming to terms with the death of her dad.
It’s just so boring to read and Frazier isn’t able to animate the material into something compelling. It’s also quite jarring right at the end when we find out the protagonist’s name - not because it’s unusual but because I didn’t even notice up to that point that I didn’t know her name. I hadn’t appreciated how important knowing a character’s name is - it’s the most basic connection you can have with them - and feels partly why I didn’t care about her or anything she was doing, besides Frazier’s inability to do this with her prose.
I’ll give her some credit though for several brief scenes in the final act between Pizza Girl, Billy, her mom, and her drunk dad that felt heartfelt and moving - that should’ve really been the novel; forget Jenny and all that tedious rubbish and focus on Pizza Girl coming to grips with her reality and figuring it out.
But it’s very little even for a short novel like this and doesn’t make it worth reading just for that. Pizza Girl is a very unimpressive, dreary and forgettable novel.
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