Name: Pizza Girl
ISBN: 9780008431549

Jean Kyoung Frazier

Named a Vogue, Esquire, NPR, Marie Claire, and Refinery29 Best Book of the Year. Perfect for fans of Normal People and Fleabag Great inventiveness, unfailing intelligence and empathy, and best of all a rare and shimmering wit’ Richard Ford

Pizza Girl

Kat Campbell

sina (she/her) 

tiff <3

I remembered being a quiet little kid, constantly aware and uncomfortable with the ways grown-ups talked to me, how much they seemed to want from me. 

I knew then that all the moments that followed would be in service to that one. I would be scratching my nose, brushing my hair, double-knotting my sneakers, driving to work, talking to Mom, Billy, Darryl, whatever hungry soul opened the door, standing in the shower scrubbing sweat, grease, whatever got stuck to me through the day off my skin, and I would ask myself - what are all the ways to make Jenny Hauser smile?

...but as Jenny stood in front of me in that grocery store parking lot, I realized how avoidance was the most attention you could give something.

There was still so much I wanted to ask her. What exactly I meant to her, how much of herself did she actually reveal to me, did she still miss me sometimes like I missed her - a missing that had no electricity, no lightning, or thunder, a missing like a hand digging into an empty chip bag searching for crumbs, any last salty bit, a missing more like mourning.

In the tradition of audacious and wryly funny novels like The Idiot and Convenience Store Woman comes the wildly original coming-of-age story of a pregnant pizza delivery girl who becomes obsessed with one of her customers. Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She's grieving the death of her father (whom she has more in common with than she'd like to admit), avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future. Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighborhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickled-covered pizzas for her son's happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other toward middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways. Bold, tender, propulsive, and unexpected in countless ways, Jean Kyoung Frazier's Pizza Girl is a moving and funny portrait of a flawed, unforgettable young woman as she tries to find her place in the world.

A Novel

Felt like writing a review and realised I haven't yet written abt this one. Enjoyed it so much, honestly a crime the writer hasn't yet written any other books. It's a witty, easy, fun, hooking read. Relatable sometimes, completely unrelatable at others, but also just weird (in the best way possible). If you want a book about a girl who has no business being as obsessed with random strangers as she is, this is for you. Very much a stalker, very much escalating until my jaw was ON THE FLOOR. The writing is pretty good too, def got some quotes you can underline/highlight if you're into that + a scene where a raccon is washing his hands so, if you needed any more of a reason to pick it up..

 A solid 4 stars. Someone please get Jane some psychological help lmao.

Iara Ferreira Figueira

Felt like writing a review and realised I haven't yet written abt this one. Enjoyed it so much, honestly a crime the writer hasn't yet written any other books. It's a witty, easy, fun, hooking read. Relatable sometimes, completely unrelatable at others, but also just weird (in the best way possible). If you want a book about a girl who has no business being as obsessed with random strangers as she is, this is for you. Very much a stalker, very much escalating until my jaw was ON THE FLOOR. The writing is pretty good too, def got some quotes you can underline/highlight if you're into that + a scene where a raccon is washing his hands so, if you needed any more of a reason to pick it up..

 A solid 4 stars. Someone please get Jane some psychological help lmao.

The story got interesting on the last one-third of the book and it was worth it

Alisha

"if i didn't exist, neither did it. the lack of my existence eliminated the need to imagine it, to wonder how it would do in the world, to see it crawling, walking, stretching to its full height [...] and becoming a person i had no doubt i would continually fail to understand despite shared dna."

what i took from this, at least, is the masterful weaving of the horror story of unplanned pregnancy while at the same time a love letter to it. i don't know how kyoung-frazier did it exactly, but at the root of this is such a human story about forgiveness while also recognizing certain elements of life have shaped you to be who you are; but that in some ways it's your responsibility to get out of them. the main character doesn't like herself for 90% of the book and i found that deeply relatable. her complicated feelings towards her grief for her father and anger at what she perceived was a dead end situation are sentiments i relate to fully. the questionable latching on to an older female figure and the unhealthy attachment she's formed (however one-sided) with her.

i don't think this book was written in a way to make the reader root for her. she's an awful human being who has good moments of humanity, but is altogether still very much a teenager who is angry and feels wronged and wants to go scorched earth on everyone. i think these big very big teenage feelings are valid, so while i found most her decisions just ridiculous, i can't divorce my critic from the objective fact that probably a lot of why she made those decisions is because she's still so painfully young. her life was interrupted and made stagnant by pregnancy. she doesn't gush over it. she self-destructs at the absence of viable mentors and connects with all the wrong ones only to end up coming to a ~ nirvana ~ moment in the end which was probably the most unrealistic thing about it all hence the three stars.

all in all a surprisingly somber read. nothing groundbreaking in the introspection it leaves us with, but as a woman who also dreads the idea of childbirth and dead end situations and feeling like the world is designed to always leave me behind, i found her refreshingly relatable.

🫂

"if i didn't exist, neither did it. the lack of my existence eliminated the need to imagine it, to wonder how it would do in the world, to see it crawling, walking, stretching to its full height [...] and becoming a person i had no doubt i would continually fail to understand despite shared dna."

what i took from this, at least, is the masterful weaving of the horror story of unplanned pregnancy while at the same time a love letter to it. i don't know how kyoung-frazier did it exactly, but at the root of this is such a human story about forgiveness while also recognizing certain elements of life have shaped you to be who you are; but that in some ways it's your responsibility to get out of them. the main character doesn't like herself for 90% of the book and i found that deeply relatable. her complicated feelings towards her grief for her father and anger at what she perceived was a dead end situation are sentiments i relate to fully. the questionable latching on to an older female figure and the unhealthy attachment she's formed (however one-sided) with her.

i don't think this book was written in a way to make the reader root for her. she's an awful human being who has good moments of humanity, but is altogether still very much a teenager who is angry and feels wronged and wants to go scorched earth on everyone. i think these big very big teenage feelings are valid, so while i found most her decisions just ridiculous, i can't divorce my critic from the objective fact that probably a lot of why she made those decisions is because she's still so painfully young. her life was interrupted and made stagnant by pregnancy. she doesn't gush over it. she self-destructs at the absence of viable mentors and connects with all the wrong ones only to end up coming to a ~ nirvana ~ moment in the end which was probably the most unrealistic thing about it all hence the three stars.

all in all a surprisingly somber read. nothing groundbreaking in the introspection it leaves us with, but as a woman who also dreads the idea of childbirth and dead end situations and feeling like the world is designed to always leave me behind, i found her refreshingly relatable.

Sohini Roy

A win for anyone who enjoys an unstable & unreliable narrator. 

Alli

Lindy

I've got some thoughts rolling around in my head about how Pizza Girl asks readers to be sympathetic to a character who's flawed in a way and extent people really only do for male characters. I mean, the complaints seem to be 1) she's not very nice/a sociopath (she's clearly deeply depressed) and 2) she's failing her moral duties as a pregnant woman (by not being overjoyed by it and by having an addiction). 

Can't say I liked everything about this book, but I respect it and will be interested in reading what Jean Kyoung Frazier writes next.

annalyse! 

putting pickles on pizza is a genius idea

lexie

Jane had every unhinged woman personality in every book. obsession, daddy issues, alcoholism, and pregnancy

jayla

"Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She's grieving the death of her father (who she has more in common with than she'd like to admit), avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future. Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighborhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickled covered pizzas for her son's happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other towards middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways. Bold, tender, propulsive, and unexpected in countless ways, Jean Kyoung Frazier's Pizza Girl is a moving and funny portrait of a flawed, unforgettable young woman as she tries to find her place in the world"--

Interesting to see Jane spiral out of control. To me it was a funny and quick read, very light in the way it’s written so it’s easy.

I also liked how I agreed with her delusions to some point, like you get fully immersed in her pov so it’s also easy to understand why she was so delusional and misunderstood everything.

We love Jane tho, and hope she sees someone about her issues bc#deepdaddyissues

Denisse Garcia Ramírez 

Interesting to see Jane spiral out of control. To me it was a funny and quick read, very light in the way it’s written so it’s easy.

I also liked how I agreed with her delusions to some point, like you get fully immersed in her pov so it’s also easy to understand why she was so delusional and misunderstood everything.

We love Jane tho, and hope she sees someone about her issues bc#deepdaddyissues

a story about a young woman spiraling with the inability to picture her future, causing us to follow her through a series of unfortunate decisions that somehow seem fitting, despite the people they hurt. frazier weaves in these almost poetic blurbs when describing the main character's emotions and feelings that give even the wildest of delusions a softer touch. a tale of grief, obsession, and the all-encompassing dread of realizing a world has ended and you cannot imagine a new one.

Named a Vogue, Esquire, NPR, Marie Claire, and Refinery29 Best Book of the Year. Perfect for fans of Normal People and Fleabag Great inventiveness, unfailing intelligence and empathy, and best of all a rare and shimmering wit' Richard Ford

Alice Myles

a story about how making yourself the main character and treating others as merely side characters can have a negative effect on your relationships as you start to imprint your opinions about others onto them as if they were their own plus near the end had me so shook I physically had to put the book down and pace

erin knopp

juno

i have to say, this book has the exact ambience of pizza

Fraser Simons

This is verisimilitude done right. I liked how the thoughts of Pizza Girl conjure the ennui of a life where few things deviate from established patterns, and also readily telegraph the accents of her personality that are at odds with the perceived monotony. She’s funny and smart. 

But grief is a thing that enters every aspect of a persons’ life. She’s lost her dad, forcing her to reckon with conflicting notions of who he was. Memories and verbal accounts from her mother surface from Pizza Girl’s stream of conscious. 

I’ve always found narratives with a catalyst like grief to be interesting. It’s one of the only things that feels like it should be so broad that it ought to be generic, but in practice the specificity of the conflict triggers internal and external factors in such unique ways that anyone finds it accessible and easy to empathize with. It also has an unwieldy and unique property, since grief is unique to the individual. You find yourself being surprised at how they work through it and what the climax ends up being. 

It’s an easy framework for defying expectations and endearment, as it does here.

This wasn’t on my radar until I saw The Poptimist Stop Asian Hate Reading List YouTube video. Check it out, there are lots of great picks here: https://youtu.be/8xTmhWJlis4

Josh Clement

I’ll be honest, I was eyeing this book mainly for the cover art and I had a feeling (debut novel, depression, LA) it might be similar to Body High by Jon Lindsay, which was awesome.

This wasn’t awesome. It wasn’t fast paced, shocking, weird or funny.

I did like the idea of “Han”, translated to a “sickness of the soul” and the rule for ordering at a diner.

For something similar, I’d recommend ‘New Animal’ by Ella Baxter.

Enjoyed reading it a lot, easy and quick read. 

Leah Marshall 

I loved it. Beautiful prose. Minimal plot. It’s weird and sad

Arden Kowalski

Surprisingly good. I'd describe this as Moshfegh adjacent rather than similar to Sally Rooney (y'all are not Sally Rooney and you never will be) but I enjoyed it quite a bit. A smartly written novel with a cast of characters that feel like they could be real. I would probably give this book a 3.8 if Goodreads allowed for it, but I thought it was strong enough in overarching themes and worldview that I'm content with rating 4 stars.

Kath Lau

We have an unnamed eighteen-year old pregnant pizza girl who is grieving the loss of her father. She then gets obssessed with one of her customers. I like deeply-flawed characters and this one is right up my alley. I liked the writing as well. It's dark and brutally honest.

Great inventiveness, unfailing intelligence and empathy, and best of all a rare and shimmering wit’ Richard Ford The must-read literary debut novel for fans of Normal People and Fleabag ‘Riotously funny’ Elle

Pam Sartain

Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazieris about a pregnant 18 year old, who works as a pizza delivery person.  Her alcoholic father died a year ago, she lives with her mom and her boyfriend, and she's feeling lost and alone.  She's worried she'll end up like her father, but still drinks alcohol whilst pregnant, whilst knowing she's doing a horrible thing.

Then she answers the phone to a weird request, a pepperoni pizza with pickles on it, requested by a woman for her homesick son, and life changes for pizza girl as she starts to obsess over this woman, Jenny.

This was bleak, funny, heartwarming and addresses how lonely you can be even when surrounded by loved ones.  Maybe especially so.  It is a good read, but sad, and reminded me a lot of how I felt when reading  Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine .

 Pizza Girl  is released in the UK on 17th September 2020, and is available to buy from  Amazon ,  Waterstones , and your  local independent bookshop .

You can follow Jean Kyoung Frazier on her  website ,  Instagram  and  Twitter .

I was given this book in exchange for an unbiased review, and so my thanks to NetGalley and to  HQ .

Cindy

I could totally see this as a movie; Pizza Girl has that dark, wry humor that would translate well into a screenplay. Jane (the protagonist) has a voice that feels young and teenaged that reminds me so much of Lady Bird and Juno, but with the emotionally stunted outlook that reminds me of Keiko in Convenience Store Woman. It's an interesting, compelling read that feels unique and familiar all at once.