Love in the Margins

Life got in the way this week, and we didn’t have a review to run today, so please enjoy this repost from my basically defunct personal blog. I lovingly copied and pasted it just for you, because I care.

This is a short little novella so there’s not a ton to discuss. It’s a girl-carries-a-flame-for-her-older-brother’s-friend story featuring a curvy heroine and a muscular hero, but the story is almost inconsequential. The beauty of this book is in the telling.

It’s told in first-person present tense from the heroine’s point of view, which I typically loathe. Stein, however puts on a clinic for How It Should Be Done. The heroine’s personality is front and center, pouring from the little asides and stream of consciousness. You feel all of her emotions along with her as she puzzles them out with the reader. Occasionally she breaks out in Pratchett-like lists, at one point making me break out in hysterical laughter in the middle of some seriously hot sexual tension:

c) There is something pressing into the small of my back, and I’m pretty sure it isn’t a tube of Rolos. And if it is, he really needs to tell me where he bought such an enormous packet.

I love Rolos.

I will add a caveat or a content note to this, as it deals with fat in a way that some people might find problematic.

Early in the story, Steven, the hero, tells a story using a lot of fat-phobic and fat-shaming language:

‘So I picked up this cute little fat chick,’
…
‘And I mean, she was a big girl. I could hardly get my arms around her waist.’
…
‘And her arse … Man, her arse was the size of a small planet.’
‘But the best part was these thighs she had … These big, billowing thighs.’
‘It was like an avalanche of flesh, on top of me. At one point, I was genuinely afraid for my life – one false move and I could have been crushed.’
…
‘But then it turned out that she was a total maniac who liked to eat paint. Thank God she was heavy … I didn’t have to run all that fast to get away from her.’

The heroine, being fat (“Anything over a size two would likely make the grade, in his eyes, and I passed that stage around 12 levels ago. You could times his ideal size by seven and still not get where I’m at.”), naturally takes offense at his language and blows up, effectively telling him to go fuck himself. Now, he’s immediately sorry he’s hurt her feelings, and I think a later conversation gives his comments some context that make them more about the girl he’s disparaging than a dig at fatness, but YMMV.

I liked how body image was used in the story, for the most part. I thought Judy was insecure about her body without ever drifting into self-loathing. She frequently frets about Steven’s opinion of her body, but seems to also view his potential rejection as his own damn problem, and not a measure of her self-worth. The story also seems to avoid the common “a man loves your body, therefore you’re lovable” pitfall I often see in fat romance. It does a good job of showing that Steven’s attracted to Judy in particular, and that’s the source of his affinity for a curvy woman (‘I really like curvy girls.’ He pauses, right before the kicker. Then he delivers it, with all the punch he can muster. ‘Probably because of you.’)

I am, as many of you know, skinny as a toothpick, and really haven’t got any experience with “extra” weight, so if you read this differently, I’m all ears.

Final Assessment: If this were an HFN rather than an HEA, I’d give it five stars. The emotion and passion was just completely awesome and the narration was pitch-fucking-perfect. I just thought the ILYs at the end felt rushed and unnecessary. B+