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A Novel
by Rachel DeWoskin
Book Reviewed by:A scathingly funny and moving book about dreams and reality, at once light on its feet and unwaveringly serious.
Judy Lohden is your above-average sixteen-year-old - sarcastic and vulnerable, talented and uncertain, full of big dreams for a big future. With a singing voice that can shake an auditorium, she should be the star of Darcy Academy, the local performing arts high school. So why is a girl this promising hiding out in a seedy motel room on the edge of town?
The fact that the national media is on her trail after a controversy that might bring down the whole school could have something to do with it. And that scandal has something - but not everything - to do with the fact that Judy is three feet nine inches tall.
Rachel DeWoskin remembers everything about high school: the auditions (painful), the parents (hovering), the dissection projects (compelling), the friends (outcasts), the boys (crushable), and the girls (complicated), and she lays it all out with a wit and wistfulness that is half Holden Caulfield, half Lee Fiora, Prep's ironic heroine. Big Girl Small is a scathingly funny and moving book about dreams and reality, at once light on its feet and unwaveringly serious.
DeWoskin's novel evokes high school life with a kind of biting cynicism while it simultaneously offers a hopeful coming-of-age story with a performing arts setting that will appeal to fans of the television shows Fame and Glee. Big Girl Small is both sophisticated thematically and (at times) raucously crude, the kind of book both teenage girls and their parents might laugh along with...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
In Rachel DeWoskin's novel, Big Girl Small, Judy Lohden has achondroplasia, a genetic bone growth disorder that results in short-limbed dwarfism (responsible for about 70% of all dwarfism cases). The word "achondroplasia" literally means "without cartilage formation," however, the term is a bit of a misnomer as the body of a person with achondroplasia is able to form cartilage but then fails to convert it to bone (especially in the long bones, i.e. arms and legs). This happens when there is a mutation of the FGFR3 gene (the gene responsible for producing a protein that develops and maintains the growth of bone and brain tissue), which then causes disruptions in skeletal development.
Affecting 1 out of every 15,000 - 40,000 births, a ...
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If you liked Big Girl Small, try these:
The Miseducation of Cameron Post
by Emily M. Danforth
Published 2013
The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a stunning and unforgettable literary debut about discovering who you are and finding the courage to live life according to your own rules.
by Cris Beam
Published 2012
An inspiring story of self-discovery, of choosing to stand up for yourself, and of finding your own path - readers will recognize a part of themselves in J's struggle to love his true self.
Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng and More Than It Hurts You
Big Girl Small is the most engaging novel I've read in many years. DeWoskin has aimed the book at all the pleasure centers: it's sad, funny, quirkily suspenseful, and - most of all - beautiful. I can't imagine a more satisfying read. A book for anyone, anywhere, who's ever felt alien or different. That is, a book for everyone.
