If its satire is sometimes a little on-the-nose, it’s only because real life, when you are talking about female grievances, is a dog’s breakfast of things so terrible they hardly need to be satirized. Plum is lumbering through life in a lonely, dreamlike and generally dissatisfied state; things will take off, she knows, when her thin self is revealed.On the Nola and Nedra Show, Nola Larson King said: “I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier, Nedra, and I agree with you.
Suddenly, though, the narrative shifts from Plum’s first-person diary to a newsy third-person account of the aforementioned rapists sailing through the air. DIETLAND is a fantastic book. (From the publisher.) When Dietland begins, Plum has scheduled a stomach-stapling surgery; she pre-emptively orders beautiful clothes for a much thinner person, clothes she will wear once her organs have been re-sectioned and her stomach reduced to “the size of a walnut”. And you may take some cold comfort from Dietland, and its opportunities for vicarious revenge.Dietland’s structural oddities notwithstanding, its message resonates.
But the spliced-in accounts are structurally inelegant, and occasionally give the novel a patchwork quality, like an unfinished garment marked up with pins and tailor’s chalk.
There is humor, great characters, nuanced discussions of gender and body image, and in-your-face arguments about oppression and suppression of women in the US.
Dietland review – a ferocious and funny drama for the #MeToo era. This abrupt change – the men’s violent end and the savagery for which it was earned – is jarring, but it also marks the point at which things get a little more interesting for Plum. It's courageous, compassionate, intelligent, pissed off and much more fun than it has any right to be. It is jarring to me how many reviews of this book state that people liked the storyline about Plum when she was starving herself, hiding and ashamed of her weight, waiting for the day that she would one day be thin, but that once the book delved into some deep feminist terrorism territory, with the main character finally being able to lash out against the society that made her ashamed of who she was in the first …
All Rights Reserved.Despite some distractions, there’s an irresistible charm to Owens’ first foray into nature-infused romantic fiction.If You’ve Purchased Author ServicesWe’re glad you found a book that interests you!Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.At just over 300 pounds, Plum Kettle is waiting for her real life to start: she’ll be a writer.
" Dietland is a book I have been waiting for someone to write all my life, and it hit me hard right where I live, right where so many of us have wasted too much time living.
Under the tutelage of Verena Baptist, anti-diet crusader and heiress to the Baptist diet fortune (a diet with which Plum is intimately familiar), Plum undertakes a far more daring—and more dangerous—five-step plan: to live as her true self now.
The last time I reviewed a book by a woman in these pages, someone tweeted “Perenial [sic] ‘pinky-in-panty’, cunt-lit! When are wimun [sic] going to be begin to see the world by other paths other [sic] than their twats!” A comment about Dietland on Goodreads expressed disappointment that Plum “turned from a hopeful dreamer into an angry, confrontational and quite unlikeable young woman”. From the time we’re little girls, we’re taught to fear the bad man who might get us … Isn’t that a form of terrorism?”The book seems at first as though it will be about one woman’s struggle with her weight, buttressed by the related struggles of her young advice-seekers – girls who cut, girls who compare their breasts unfavorably to breasts they see on TV. It's courageous, compassionate, intelligent, pissed off and much more fun than it has any right to be. " “I think it’s a response to terrorism. As I type this review, I look up at the television and see a pair of ideal breasts displayed alluringly on a beach, the owner of which encourages me to purchase Direct TV. The marriage of gonzo satire with a more earnest heroine’s awakening was never going to be an entirely comfortable one, although it allows for great moments. /. Plum mopes around her cousin’s Brooklyn apartment and a local cafe, answering torrents of mail from troubled young women and eating grim little “Waist Watchers” meals. 4. But Sarai Walker's Dietland gives us a new fat protagonist — complex, compelling and dangerous.