Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"In Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s achingly beautiful coming-of-age debut novel,
Big Girl, this body carries the weight of an entire neighborhood....
Big Girl triumphs as a love letter to the Black girls who are forced to enter womanhood too early — and to a version of Harlem that no longer exists. In this novel, gentrification means a violent thinning of the true beauty of Black and immigrant cultures and tightknit communities that have been nearly erased in service of commercialism and whiteness." -- Cleyvis Natera - New York Times Book Review
"Big Girl... is as bighearted and as celebratory as a work can be. Set in Harlem’s “indominable largesse” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this is a book of big appetites, big feelings, big questions (“What else might a woman turn out to be?”), Biggie Smalls, big desires. Sullivan writes joyfully about bodies, the city, youth, culture, music, extended family, and food, describing them all with vivid, carnal detail. Against this backdrop, she unflinchingly examines what we do to Black girls and women: how even our best intentions squeeze them into small shapes." -- Annie Liontas - BOMB Magazine
"Sullivan (the collection
Blue Talk and Love) charms in her stunning debut novel about a Black girl’s coming-of-age.... All of Sullivan’s characters—even the cruel ones—brim with humanity, and the author shines when conveying the details of Malaya’s comforts, such as Biggie Smalls lyrics, the portraits she paints in her room, the colors she braids into her hair, and the sweet-smelling dulce de coco candies she eats with a classmate with whom she shares a close and sexually charged friendship. This is a treasure." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review
"[A] young girl learns—and redefines—what it means to take up space . . . Sullivan writes with tenderness and uses the language of poetry to communicate her protagonist’s inner life . . . A lyrical and important coming-of-age novel." -- Kirkus Reviews
