On Monday I posted about Danielle Steel's upcoming novel, Happy Birthday. I was particularly excited about this, having been a Danielle Steel fan in my teens. I hadn't picked up another of her novels until about two weeks ago, which was Big Girl. Big Girl was released in March and the synopsis intrigued me, so I decided to jump back into another Steele book for the first time in ages. What can I say? Her novels were always addictive and I enjoyed every one I read.Now? Not so much.
Big Girl is set in LA and is about, as you can probably guess, a girl who's overweight. But there's more to it than that. Victoria was born to rich, all-American parents; a successful dad and beautiful mom with perfect looks and a perfect life that would now be complete with the birth of their beautiful baby. But Victoria isn't beautiful, and instead of inheriting the picture-perfect looks of her parents, she's an overweight, large-nosed family throwback, named after Queen Victoria because of her 'ugliness'. As a child Victoria always thinks that being named after a queen made her important; her father's own little queen, and when she finally figures out the real reason behind her namesake, so begins the strain on her confidence.
Victoria is used to her father's taunts, but when baby sister Gracie arrives, it only gets worse. Gracie is small, beautiful and perfect in every way, and her parents love her (Victoria's father calls Victoria the 'tester cake'), lavishing their attention on the gorgeous baby they always wanted. However, Victoria also adores her new baby sister, and as they grow up, despite their differences, they're extremely close.
Growing up being the 'tester cake' is not easy, and even though Victoria is intelligent and ambitious, she's constantly reminded that men don't want smart girls...nor chunky ones. When Victoria finally moves out to go to college, each visit to her parents results in her dad's teasing and her mother's weight-related questions. At least with her new life in New York, where Victoria is soon to be employed as a teacher, she can escape from her family and finally start a new life in which she's accepted as who she is.
Meanwhile, Gracie is blooming into the beautiful girl her parents always desired, surrounded by boys and with high hopes for the future. Victoria's chosen career as a teacher has never been good enough for her father, who constantly complains that she'll never earn enough.
As the years go on and Gracie heads to college, with Victoria still a teacher at an elite school, it's not long before Gracie is dating one of the richest boys on campus who, needless to say, their father adores. Four years later they're engaged, and even though the girls' parents are ecstatic at the prospect of their youngest daughter marrying into money, still-single Victoria can see that Gracie is making a huge mistake...
Having read DS novels in the past, I did expect this one to be a tiny bit predictable. For example, Gracie is the token all-American girl, daughter of equally perfect parents and Victoria is the overweight one, so I kind of had an inkling as to what might come next (Victoria goes off to college, gets a job she loves, battles with her weight, finally accepts herself. Voila!) But I was still interested to see what happened. The first couple of chapters are brilliant and I was hooked for a while, until it got to a point where...well, nothing else happened.
Victoria gets to college, and that's when the supposed plot flies out of the window. I read on, waiting to see what would happen next, but nothing did. At first I assumed this would be a tale about two sisters with two entirely different lives which would collide in some way and there's be something - anything - that would happen to challenge their loving relationship and give them different outlooks on life. Nothing like that occured. Gracie carries on with her perfect life with her parents, engaged to Harry...and okay, there's the wedding involved which is where things start to heat up (trying to avoid spoilers here) but that's the only time something actually happens and that's towards the end.
The majority of the book is mainly about Victoria, throughout the years, trying to live with herself as a big girl, attempting diets, failing diets, trying at the gym, putting the weight back on, working, trying to get a boyfriend, visiting her parents and Gracie, going out with her roomates and getting therapy. It reads just like a general account of any normal twenty-something's life. Possibly less interesting.
What annoyed me a lot was that nobody stuck up for Victoria. Her dad is an absolute horror and yet nobody in the family rebelled against his taunts about Victoria. Worse still, nothing happens to their parents at the end of the book to teach them a lesson, which would have been nice, considering they've made their first-born daughter's life a misery simply because she didn't look good enough.
There's so much promise at the beginning of this book and it left me bewildered, because I was enjoying it, until I realised that it was just going nowhere. I finished it reluctantly, mainly to see if something happened that would make up for the book's dragging middle. But I was mistaken.
That said, I've been a Danielle Steel fan for some time and I won't let the disappointment of Big Girl deter me from reading her next books. I'm planning on getting Happy Birthday as soon as it's released, and I'm hoping it's a lot better than this one. As much as I hate to say it, Big Girl is only getting 2 stars from me.
Rating: 2/5
