Burst!

I don’t even know where to start on this thing. Plum, the protagonist, is still whirling around my head and I’m not quite ready to let her go.

The book starts out like any other chick lit-ish story. Plum is an overweight young woman who works in New York at a teen magazine called Daisy Chain, answering young women’s letters on the magazine’s website. She is in a constant cycle of dieting, denial and anti-depressants and has finally decided that the skinny girl inside needs to come out so she’s scheduled surgery to have her stomach stapled. She has a closet fill of beautiful clothes that will wear once she loses the weight and becomes Alicia, the thin girl within. It looks like it’s just going to be another story about learning to love yourself as you are, blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda.  But as we learn more about her and her struggles the story slowly takes a turn into new territory and it becomes something else entirely. There’s intrigue, there’s real transformation and growth. And there are thought provoking issues of feminism and identity and how women are perceived and portrayed in modern culture and media. I don’t want to give too much away, because coming into this with very little knowledge increased my enjoyment considerably.

‘….I looked at my body, the body that kept me alive for nearly thirty years, without any serious health problems, the body that had taken me where I needed to go and protected me. I had never appreciated or loved the body that had dome so much for me. I had thought of it as my enemy, as nothing more than a shell. The body was me. This is your real life. You are already living it.”

Well written, with living breathing characters and a heroine worth applauding, I am surprised this is Ms. Walker’s first novel. Bravo.