Dumplin’ (Dumplin’ #1) by Julie Murphy
Rating: 1/5 stars
My Thoughts:
Cool idea! Bad execution… and pretty much everything else.
Dumplin’ is about Willowdean (called Dumplin’ by her mother), the fat daughter of her beauty queen mother. Will is comfortable in her own skin, despite everything anyone else says. As Will gets a job and finds herself in a sort of relationship with hot jock Bo, she begins to doubt herself and her body. To regain her confidence, she joins her town’s popular beauty pageant with her best friend Ellen and a bunch of other misfits in tow.
All my life I’ve had a body worth commenting on and if living in my skin has taught me anything it’s that if it’s not your body, it’s not yours to comment on.
What I wanted: a book with a girl who is plus sized, accepts it but is still kickass in knowing her own worth while being body-positive the whole way to herself and every other girl. Throw in maybe some romance, fun friendships, and some fun in a beauty pageant.
What I got: an insecure angst filled girl who literally fat-shames AND skinny-shames girls whether they are fatter than her or not and hangs out with girls she deems lamer than her to make herself feel better. She also strings along a nice guy for pretty much no reason, while wanting to make out with some other guy who she dumped. She also treats her best friend like crap while trying to take the moral high ground.
Willowdean sucks.
Maybe if this book wasn’t supposed to be a book about a confident fat girl killing it in a beauty pageant it wouldn’t have been such a problem but Will is never confident. Not once, even before she “dated” Bo. She picks up tiny scraps of confidence at the end but it’s a bit too late for that, don’t you think? She was just so lowkey annoying in the fact that she would judge EVERYONE, even her own new “friends”.
She doesn’t even join the pageant until over halfway through the book. Most of the book is her just… hanging out. She goes to work, goes to school, bitches at her mother, her mother bitches at her, she quits her job, gets another job, quits that one then goes back to the first one, goes out with some other dude for no reason, and then gets in a big fight with her friend and doesn’t talk to her until the end.
I guess sometimes the perfection we perceive in others is made up of a whole bunch of tiny imperfections, because some days the damn dress just won’t zip.
Love triangles suck. A character going out with a guy she never really liked in the first place and leading him on is worse. Instead of her even breaking it off with him, she waits for him to do it long after she should have ended it. Will also has NO chemistry with either boy, let along Bo, the most boring guy ever she is love with after a time skip. I can’t get over how absolutely boring their relationship was, even in their bonding times. (Have to mention the tiny little wish-fulfillment. Maybe don’t have two super hot jocks into your girl for no reason right off the bat.)
The one positive is how fast this book went. At least in reading this that I learned I have no interested in Dolly Parton, beauty pageants, and Texas (sorry Texas).
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