Pizza Girl

by Jean Kyoung Frazier

In the tradition of audacious and wryly funny novels like The Idiot and Convenience Store Woman comes the wildly original coming-of-age story of a pregnant pizza delivery girl who becomes obsessed with one of her customers.

Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She's grieving the death of her father (whom she has more in common with than she'd like to admit), avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future.

Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighborhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickled-covered pizzas for her son's happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other toward middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways.

Bold, tender, propulsive, and unexpected in countless ways, Jean Kyoung Frazier's Pizza Girl is a moving and funny portrait of a flawed, unforgettable young woman as she tries to find her place in the world.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Queer, LGBT, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Lesbian

200 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 9, 2020

About the author

Lives in Los Angeles. Pizza Girl is her debut novel.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know that recurrent realization that every single person you have ever seen in your life is a human being with a complex worldview and internal monologue, relationship dynamics and trials and tribulations and a favorite flavor of popsicle?

https://emmareadstoomuch.substack.com...

This is like if that realization were 200 pages long and funnier.

And made me want to eat pizza.

So very much up my alley.

Bottom line: People are great and so is pizza! This has evidence of both.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the tender and messy emotions in Pizza Girl even as I wanted more from the book too. The novel follows an unnamed eighteen-year-old pregnant pizza girl, who feels suffocated by the care of her supportive mother and doting boyfriend and haunted by the death of her alcoholic father. Early in the novel she meets Jenny, a stay-at-home mother who orders pizza with pickles on it. Our protagonist develops an obsession with Jenny and wants everything to do with her. This infatuation spirals into some very unfortunate events that speak to our protagonist’s complicated and damaged heart.

I so appreciated how Jean Kyoung Frazier showed her protagonist’s more nuanced and uncomfortable emotions. The protagonist of Pizza Girl feels frustrated and annoyed with her mother and boyfriend even though they do their best to care for her. She cannot quite let go of how her father failed her and drinks alcohol, even while pregnant, to cope. Instead of delving into the root issues of what looks like perinatal depression, she develops a fantasy surrounding a stay-at-home mother she delivers a pizza to. Frazier constructs our protagonist in a way that her struggles feel so earnest and even relatable, though her experiences are quite unique – her longing for a different life, her inability to shake her past, and her questioning of herself and her place in the world all resonated.

I give this book three stars because I feel positively toward it though I felt it could have been further fleshed out. For example, Frazier does an excellent job portraying the ennui in our protagonist’s relationship with her boyfriend, but the development and/or unpacking of that relationship feels like it got cut short, like there is more we could have seen. I also wanted to know more about our protagonist and her mother’s relationship with whiteness and white supremacy; early in the book the protagonist reflects on her mother’s preoccupation with “Americanness,” which I read as code for whiteness, and I wanted to understand how that influenced their lives. I liked how Frazier wrote the protagonist’s journey with mourning her dad though, her poignant, nonlinear, and unwieldy journey of grief for a man who should have treated her and her mother so much better.

In some ways I hesitate to recommend this novel because it feels like a snapshot of something greater, yet I do think it may appeal to those who want a quick yet interesting read, especially those who find the synopsis intriguing. I feel curious about what Frazier will write next after this unconventional debut.

[Sam Quixote · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pizza Girl is 18 years old, preggers and working at a pizza shop. Then she meets Jenny, a middle-aged mom with a son who will only eat pizza with pickles on. And so begins a strange friendship…

… yeah I didn’t like Jean Kyoung Frazier’s debut novel Pizza Girl. The blurb comparing it to Normal People makes me laugh - I don’t think the marketing team for this book read Sally Rooney’s novel because there is no similarity whatsoever, they just saw her sales figures and are trying to make that happen for this!

Almost nothing occurs in the book. Pizza Girl gets obsessed with Jenny for no real reason - I guess she finds out that she’s gay or bi-sexual at least? But that relationship doesn’t go anywhere, it’s never developed and little else happens. She ignores her loving boyfriend Billy (who really deserves better) and she’s generally depressed - her life isn’t going anywhere, she doesn’t know what she wants to do, she’s not ready to be a mother, and she’s still coming to terms with the death of her dad.

It’s just so boring to read and Frazier isn’t able to animate the material into something compelling. It’s also quite jarring right at the end when we find out the protagonist’s name - not because it’s unusual but because I didn’t even notice up to that point that I didn’t know her name. I hadn’t appreciated how important knowing a character’s name is - it’s the most basic connection you can have with them - and feels partly why I didn’t care about her or anything she was doing, besides Frazier’s inability to do this with her prose.

I’ll give her some credit though for several brief scenes in the final act between Pizza Girl, Billy, her mom, and her drunk dad that felt heartfelt and moving - that should’ve really been the novel; forget Jenny and all that tedious rubbish and focus on Pizza Girl coming to grips with her reality and figuring it out.

But it’s very little even for a short novel like this and doesn’t make it worth reading just for that. Pizza Girl is a very unimpressive, dreary and forgettable novel.

[The Artisan Geek · Rating 5 out of 5]

3/8/20
Did an interview with Jean back in January, so that one will hopefully be up sometime soon :)



11/1/20
WOW. I said it last year and I was right! This was so good oh my gosh! My first five star read of the year I'm so so happy! This was an amazing debut and I can't wait to see other people discover Jean Kyoung Frazier and her more than stellar writing this year! :)

14/12/19
This sounds sooo good!! WOW!


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[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I’m in the minority with this one but I’m surprised I managed to finish it, after wanting to DNF it so many times.

We have Pizza Girl, an unlikeable unnamed protagonist who develops an obsession with Jenny, a customer and wants everything to do with her. She is also pregnant, has a boyfriend and mother who are thrilled about the pregnancy while she feels differently.

The main thing for me was the lack of development in the characters and plot. Neither felt driven by that and I didn’t feel like I could emotionally connect with our main character or anyone around her. She was messy, made wrong choices and for me, totally underdeveloped. I thought I’d go into this finding her endearing and be rooting for her but in the end tbh, I just had enough of the book.

The writing was good but nah, this just wasn’t for me sadly and I’m disappointed as this was one of my most anticipated books of the summer.

[Skyler Autumn · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 Stars

This book was very forgettable. It follows the story of an unnamed self-absorbed protagonist (who is young and pregnant) and her obsession with a woman she delivers pizza too. The obsession or connection these two characters share is never really explained or explored. The most common thing I can think that these women share is their level of self absorption which is written in such way that you're not amused or entertained just irritated.

The character's in this book are so shallow and surface there is nothing to get out of it other than irritation that you wasted time reading it or money buying it. The relationship between these women is so forced that the obsession shared doesn't even make sense because the author doesn't develop anything it's just written plainly, which I guess is the theme of this entire book.

It's just 200-something pages of a character sabotage her life for the sake of it? OR Is it grief? Is sexual identity confusion? Is it bi-polar disorder? Is it alcoholism? Is it narcissism? Don't worry all these questions are answered in the end. I'm fucking kidding nothing is answered in the end because like I said there is no form of development within these pages.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is so punk rock. While I finish another Asian-American novel wrestling with notions of identity, navigating micro-aggressions and the weighty calculus of being a "model minority" I get to follow it up with this debut from queer Korean-American Jean Kyoung Frazier. Her Korean-American protagonist Pizza Girl is 18 and pregnant. She's not wringing her hands about what it means to be bi-racial and raise a child who will technically be more white than Korean, or worrying about how her dopey white boyfriend and her Korean mother will get along (great actually). Instead she's a bit on the brink and actively trying to blow up her own life. She's sneaking off to her dead father's shed in the middle of the night to drink beers and watch infomercials. She's working pizza delivery and has maybe developed a bit of a crush on a middle-aged suburban mom who requested pickles on her pizza to placate her 7-year old son. It's an L.A. slacker novel that happens to revolve around a queer Korean-American girl I didn't know I wanted. While other writers are thanking George Saunders and Uma Thurman, Frazier is shouting out Tallboy who tackled the California neon cover based on a pizza shirt he designed that she owns. Frazier's just out here living her best life and I'm here for it.

[luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus) · Rating 4 out of 5]

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“They could support a teenage pregnancy, but not this, not a person who drifted from one moment to the next without any idea about where she was headed.”

Sayaka Murata meets Ottessa Moshfegh in this freewheeling and darkly funny debut novel. Jean Kyoung Frazier's deadpan wit and playful cynicism give a subversive edge to what could otherwise seem like yet another tale of millennial ennui.

Pizza Girl is uncompromising in its portrayal of love, obsession, addiction, and depression. Our narrator and protagonist is a Korean-American pizza delivery girl who lives in suburban Los Angeles. She's eighteen years old, pregnant, and feels increasingly detached from her supportive mother and affable boyfriend. Unlike them, our narrator cannot reconcile herself with her pregnancy, and tries to avoid thinking about her future. As her alienation grows, she retreats further into herself and spends her waking hours in a perpetual state of numbing listlessness.

“Where am I going and how do I get there? What have I done and what will I continue to do? Will I ever wake up and look in the mirror and feel good about the person staring back at me?”

Her unfulfilling existence is interrupted by Jenny, a stay-at-home mother in her late thirties who orders pickled covered pizzas for her son. Our protagonist becomes enthralled by Jenny, perceiving her as both glamorous and deeply human. Pizza girl's desire for Jenny is all-consuming, and soon our narrator, under the illusion that Jenny too feels their 'connection', is hurtling down a path of self-destruction. Her reckless and erratic behaviour will unsettle both the reader and her loved ones. Yet, even at her lowest Frazier's narrator is never repelling. Her delusions, her anxieties, her world-weariness are rendered with clarity and empathy.

She feels simultaneously unseen and suffocated by the people in her life. While readers understand, to a certain extent, that her sluggish attitude and cruel words are borne out of painful frustration. Her unspoken misgivings (about who is she and what kind of future awaits her, about having a child and being a mother), her unease and guilt, her fear of resembling her now deceased alcoholic father, make her all the more desperate for a way out of her life. Unlike others Jenny seems unafraid to show her vulnerabilities, and there is a strange kinship between these two women.

“I’ll tell you what I wish someone told me when I was eighteen—it never goes away.”
“What is ‘it,’ exactly?”
“All of it, any of it, just it.”

While the world Frazier depicts seems at times incredibly pessimistic, the narrator's unerring, wry, and compelling voice never succumbs to her bleak circumstances.
Frazier's prose has this lively quality to it, one that makes Pizza Girl into an incredibly absorbing read. The feverish latter part of the story, in which others call into question our protagonist's state of mind, brought to mind Caroline O'Donoghue's novels (in particular Promising Young Women). Let it be said that things get confusing (and somewhat horrifying).

“Han was a sickness of the soul, an acceptance of having a life that would be filled with sorrow and resentment and knowing that deep down, despite this acceptance, despite cold and hard facts that proved life was long and full of undeserved miseries, “hope” was still a word that carried warmth and meaning. Despite themselves, Koreans were not believers, but feelers—they pictured the light at the end of the tunnel and fantasized about how lovely that first touch of sun would feel against their skin, about all they could do in wide-open spaces.”

Frazier's mumblecore-esque dialogues demonstrate her attentive ear for language. Speaking of language, I particularly liked pizza girl's assessment of ready replies like 'I'm okay' or 'I'm fine'.

“Fine,” a word you used when you stubbed your toe and people asked you if you were okay and you didn’t want to sound like a little bitch. When your mom gave you Cheerios after you asked for Froot Loops. Something you said to people who asked about your day and you didn’t know them well enough to give them a real answer. Never a word used when talking about anything of value.”

Pizza girl's disconnect—from others, reality, and herself—is vibrantly rendered. Her troubled relationship with her dysfunctional father hit particularly hard as I found her conflicting thoughts towards him (and the idea of resembling him) to echo my own experiences.

Similarly to Hilary Leichter and Hiromi Kawakami Frazier's surrealism is rooted in everyday life. Funny, moving, and unapologetic, Pizza Girl is a great debut novel. The narrator's fuck-ups will undoubtedly make you uncomfortable, but much of her harmful behaviour stems from self-loathing and it also points to other people's hypocritical attitudes towards those who are deemed 'troubled'.

ARC provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Read more reviews on my blog / / / View all my reviews on Goodreads

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

I devoured this scrumptious coming-of-age novel in two sittings. On the level of voice, character development, and humor it struck all the right chords. It's Catcher in the Rye with a female lead, more modern, more swear words, and just more adult. Easily a cult classic, it was one of the most memorable and enjoyable books I read all year.

I will gladly read anything else the author puts out. For a first novel, it sizzles. It never stumbles, falters or cowers. From the gorgeous cover to the immersive rhythm, the pages flew by. Who doesn't love a saucy narrator? Taking the first person internal monologue to new heights, JKF lathers each chapter with alluring, intimate details, enough to overwhelm anyone's emotional arteries. The novel explores love, in all of its myriad forms, friendship, commitment, lassitude, drudgery, modern ennui, and the angst that has become inescapable in our culture.

A thrilling, bold, timeless literary statement, not a junk food entertainment.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier. Published in 2020, everything I can really say about this wonderfully droll debut is said on the cover, designed by Emily Mahon and illustrated by Chris Coulon. Most book covers would be more compelling covered with a brown paper bag. Not only is this one awesome, but along with the title, perfectly conveys the irreverent sensibilities of the novelist. A quick read, I grinned throughout and admired how Kyoung took familiar dramatic situations and made them specific to her generation.



The novel is the first person account of our eighteen-year-old narrator, whose name remains undisclosed until the climax. She recounts the summer of 2011 and her tenure as a delivery driver for Eddie's, a Los Angeles pizza joint. She's eleven weeks pregnant by her boyfriend Billy, a classmate orphaned during their senior year of high school. The young couple live with her doting Mom, a first generation immigrant from South Korea. Her recently deceased father was a charismatic but destitute alcoholic who left his heir little more than bad memories and a '99 Ford Festiva that she wheels around on her deliveries.

Trying to forget her past and avoid her future, her life gets exciting when she receives an impassioned call from a new customer requesting a large pepperoni-and-pickles pizza. The woman, Jenny Hauser, needs this for her son, who is adjusting none too well to Los Angeles or the local pizzerias. Something in the woman's manic desperation breaks through the ennui of our narrator. She not only purchases pickles and gets the special order made, but delivers it. Enamored by the contradictions she witnesses in Jenny as well as the attention the desperate housewife basks on her, she begins to fantasize about her new customer, who refers to her only as "Pizza Girl."

It was a blessing I didn't get into a car accident. I spent the rest of my shift in a daze. My hands and feet felt and behaved like bricks. I knocked over a stack of boxes and dropped a napkin dispenser I was trying to refill. As Darryl bent down to help me clean up, he asked me if I'd taken pulls from his Bacardi.

I mixed up orders. Drew Herold got Patty Johnston's Meat Lovers, extra bacon. Patty Johnston got Drew Herold's Very Veggie, no sauce. "You might as well just get a salad," she said, shaking her head, inspecting a mushroom between her fingers. She was nice, an older mom type who looked like she was used to dealing with youthful incompetence. She didn't mind having to wait while I drove back to retrieve her pizza, just told me to include garlic bread sticks for free next time she called in. Drew Herold was less nice, told me that meat was murder, he'd be calling Domino's in the future.

When I got back to the shop, I went to the bathroom and didn't notice the seat was up. There was toilet water on my pants as Peter yelled at me. Driving home, I missed the turn for my street three times. I kept getting distracted by lamppost lights--I saw Jenny standing underneath each one. She was still lovely, even under their harsh orange glow.

Pizza Girl buzzes along on an extra high voltage line with the the voice of its protagonist, an Asian American who was an average student, is pregnant at 18 and on her way to surpassing her late father as a drunk. Frazier recognizes how thin the line is between happiness and despair, success and failure, freedom and a minimum prison sentence. One decision makes or breaks a life. Sometimes, luck intervenes either way. I was caught up in following Pizza Girl to the end of her high wire act, to see whether she made it or split her head open. Frazier's prose is awesomely detailed. I felt like I'd delivered pizzas for the summer by the end.

A man with six chihuahuas in an unmoving row behind him, one with its tongue sticking out of its mouth. A woman in scrubs with a large stain on the pants that was either blood or coffee. Three girls with braces wearing their moms' clothing and heels, face masks, curlers in their hair, drying fingernails all the same shade of alligator green. A guy who took ten minutes of knocking before he answered the door, yelled at me that I should've knocked louder, the pizza was probably cold now. A grandma type who tipped me a single dime. A small party, door answered by two dudes in sombreros. They offered me a can of PBR, icy cold, beautiful condensation, and I hesitated, but turned them down. A motel off the freeway, a dark parking lot that made me nervous, so I laced my keys between my knuckles, in 411 a guy in a robe that barely covered anything, a pair of crossed legs on the bed behind him. Several nondescript men and woman in quiet apartments, every movement--the knocking, the lock clicking open, bills being pulled from wallets, change from pockets, cardboard shifting, that final slam, lock back in place--sounding unbearably loud.

It was an average night.

Being in the head of Pizza Girl was such a invigorating experience that I felt the novel drag in the middle when she had to interact with an adult. Jenny walks her own tightrope, but is established in the grown-up world and her troubles weren't as compelling. Toward the end, I could see Pizza Girl as a fresh take on one of my favorite movies, Taxi Driver (1976). Whereas cab companies have never been part of the fabric of L.A., pizza delivery has and is. It fit that a lonely soul desperately searching for some outlet for her desire would drive pizzas around town. Pizza Girl chooses a much different outlet than Travis Bickle, but they share the same angst.

Jean Kyoung Frazier was born (in 1993) and raised in Torrance, California.



In the event you missed them: Previous reviews in the Year of Women:

Come Closer, Sara Gran
Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine

[Reading · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one is about a pregnant, eighteen-year-old pizza delivery driver called Jane who becomes obsessed with a customer called Jenny, a mum desperate to help her son settle in a new town by getting him his favourite pizza.

When Jane shows up to deliver the pizza and meets Jenny, the story starts with these two lonely souls connecting.

The book starts quirky and lighthearted, then I was surprised at how dark and depressing it became, the writing is very good though and for a debut novel - I think the writer should be proud of themselves.

I'd definitely read another of her books.

[liv ❁ · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Her name was Jenny Hauser and every Wednesday I put pickles on her pizza.”

Pizza Girl is an A24-esque short book that follows our 18-year-old pregnant pizza girl as she forms an obsessive connection with a new customer, Jenny, who orders pickles on pizza every Wednesday for her son. It’s a bit of an unsettling ride as we watch our avoidant main character latch onto this middle-aged woman who she has fed her delusions into instead of facing her own fears of being 18, pregnant, and completely terrified about every aspect of her life. As she grows more and more distant with her boyfriend and mom, these fears fester in her as all she begins to see in herself is her alcoholic late father.

“I had my father’s hands, and in my dark, honest moments at 3:00a.m. googling, I worried they weren’t the only things of his I had… I felt it strongly in the car. Dad was always going for drives late at night. I stared hard at my hands, our hands, gripping the steering wheel. He didn’t just go for drives late at night, he went for those drives in the very car I was sitting in. I nearly ran into a lamppost.”

Throughout the book, we get a sense of how like her late father pizza girl is. As she continually breaks her boyfriend and mother’s hearts, we see this untouched pain that is ripe in her, threatening to tear her apart. There is this self-hatred stemming from a hatred of her alcoholic father who she hasn’t yet allowed herself to grieve because she only really remembers the worst parts of him and her similarity to him. As she continues down a path more and more like his, getting up in the middle of the night to drink beer in his old shed and avoiding her family, we see her reach an almost breaking point. This relationship with her father elicited the most emotion out of me and I particularly loved how her mother was allowed to hold space for him to be seen in a different light while still not excusing all he did.

“He got me roses a few weeks back just because, roses that I never put in a vase, just let sit in their wrapping on the windowsill slowly wilting until they were brown and their petals had fallen in a dead heap on the floor. I never saw him clean them up. I just woke up one day and they were gone.”

There is something a little extra heartbreaking about people doing everything in their power to make someone happy due to no fault of their own; it’s just not working. That is the case with pizza girl’s mom and her boyfriend, Billy. As pizza girl pulls further away from them and continues to not confront anything, we see the heartbreaking reality of their situation and what it means to them to have pizza girl continually ignore and not want to spend time with them. It makes it incredibly hard to root for pizza girl as she is stuck in a quite delusional life, but does make one wish for her to get help at the very least so her family will know peace. There is a lot of nuance added with this everyone-is-miserable-but-I-promise-they’re-trying-their-best situation.

“They could support a teenage pregnancy, but not this, not a person who drifted from one moment to the next without any idea about where she was headed.”

Lostness is at the center of this book as pizza girl continually reflects about how she never really had any dreams and how, even if she hadn’t gotten pregnant, she would still be here, selling pizza, with no goal of anything else. Where she would be content, this festers in her as her boyfriend has to give up his dreams of a good school to care for her and her child and as she feels continually on edge about everyone pushing her, at least in her mind, to want and be more. The feeling of lostness really is a driving force in this, pushing her further and further to the oasis that Jenny and her son are.

“I almost told her that, yes, it was absolutely her fault I was in that position. That if she’d never called in to Eddie’s, never left me alone with Adam, if she’d never kissed me back, if she hadn’t made me feel special, like the things I did and said mattered, I would’ve been okay. But I knew that was a lie and that, even if I’d never picked up the phone and heard her voice on the other end, I would’ve found something else to lose myself in—if you were pushed off a cliff, you’d grab hold of anything resembling safety.”

While Jenny and her son, Adam, are conduits for pizza girl’s avoidance and powerful fixations, they aren’t really the point. As pizza girl herself brings up, they were what was there when she was (and still is) falling down into this dark place of feeling lonely and unknown and confused and like a problem to everyone. The way they represent an easy escape from her feelings and allow her to be more avoidant is the true beauty of them. There’s a scene in the epilogue of the book where we learn pizza girl’s name for the first time because Jenny had never bothered to call her anything other than pizza girl. And with that comes this acceptance that they never really were anything, pizza girl just needed an escape.

3.5/5

[Steph · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to be the type of person that walked with their back straight, the dirt under their fingernails pure. I didn't want to be a chain saw, I wanted to be a plastic baggie. No shredding, just holding. I wondered what animals lived under the shadows of my bones. I hoped they were animals of nobility - lions and eagles and horses with long manes - and not what I feared - vultures and wolves and drooling hyenas.

▴▴▴

i devoured this book like it was a late night pizza after a long and hungry day.

some readers might be turned off by the abundance of mundane details in pizza girl, but all of these details make up the daily life that our pizza girl feels trapped within. she avoids the bigger realities of her situation by focusing on the little things until she realizes that "avoidance was the most attention you could give something." and i enjoyed every one of the small details because they all feel viscerally tangible.

the book is often odd and uncomfortable because our protagonist's life is odd and uncomfortable. it feels ugly and real. frazier brings it all to life in gritty, vivid detail. there's something about the way she writes that makes everything seem understandable and relatable, too, and i absolutely love it.

Words were funny like that. One moment they could wound you, turn into bricks that would sink to the bottom of your stomach. The next moment those bricks were transforming into butterflies, eagles, pterodactyls, Frisbees, various flying objects rising to your chest and nesting in the spaces between your ribs.

one of the greatest strengths of pizza girl is the characterization. it would be easy for the story to villainize pizza girl's doting but alienated boyfriend, or her grandchild-hungry mother. but they are multifaceted, flawed, and understandable. one of my favorite scenes is the climax of jane and billy's conflict, when he finally forces her to make eye contact with him, begs her to talk to him, tells her how hurt she is by her avoidance. his earnest care is heartbreaking. jane herself is an unlikable main character, but that doesn't detract from the story. the pizza delivery recipients, assorted coworkers, and even jenny, the object of our protagonist's misguided yearning, are so nuanced and real.

and holy shit, such a good representation of confused, misguided yearning. our pizza girl needs an escape from her situation, and fixating on jenny is the perfect way to preoccupy her mind. as someone who has also developed embarrassing age gap crushes when i was struggling and needed comfort, i related deeply to the bittersweet infatuation. it can be irresistible to imagine that someone is your perfect match, that they hurt in the same way you hurt, that they alone have the power to save you. and by the end, i was amazed by jane's leap in self-awareness:

Even if I'd never picked up the phone and heard her voice on the other end, I would've found something else to lose myself in - if you were pushed off a cliff, you'd grab hold of anything resembling safety.

the dad stuff is really intense too. jane avoids her grief, and she's terrified of being like her distant, alcoholic, recently-deceased dad. yet she numbs the pain by drinking, undeterred by her age or by her pregnancy. she's too detached and avoidant to even recognize that she should feel guilt, or to examine the alcoholism linking herself to her father. it's painfully and beautifully done.

i loved this and i'll be thrilled to read whatever frazier comes out with next!!

▴▴▴

here are some quotes i especially adored:

We laughed and made marks on each other's bodies, wet red spots that even after they dried would still shine for days afterward, make us smile whenever we saw them reflected back in mirrors and windows, little red beacons that screamed to whoever stared at them, "Hey, hi, hello, howdy, look at me, I am alive and loved."

▴▴▴

I wished for all five of her fingertips to become permanent islands on the fabric of my shirt.

▴▴▴

I hoped before our kiss ended I could figure out how we could go back to before, to my bedroom when we had just met, and talking was as simple as opening our mouths and saying whatever thought popped into our minds, the words flowing out like Froot Loops from a never-ending box - colorful and sweet and so light that you could hold a whole handful without feeling like you were weighed down by anything.

[el · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book definitely belongs to the increasingly popular literary niche i like to call “domestic dread” (think raven leilani’s luster or ottessa moshfegh’s my year of rest and relaxation), and while it contained that same bleak momentum hyperspecific to unraveling women with a sudden awareness of their social conditioning, i found the actual writing—even its tiny details—mindnumbingly dull and the characters largely unconvincing. jenny more than anyone should have been able to keep me engaged, but i never at any point felt that her presence was more than a hazy silhouette. i have no idea how a book with so many minute details (something that normally enthralls me) can feel so surface-level.

i’m a socal native and so it pains me to admit that this version of LA was shockingly unimaginative 😭😭😭😭 so colorless, even and especially on a stylistic level 😭😭😭😭😭😭 felt not even a lick of nostalgia……2.3/5. a forgettable little novel.

[Kelly (and the Book Boar) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/

Is it only called a nervous breakdown if there’s someone there to point at you and be, like, “Yo, get your shit straight, you are nervous and you are breaking down”?

A dramatic reenactment of my face any time someone dared walk into my reading room while I was devouring this . . . .



Pizza Girl is definitely not going to be for everyone (ACTUAL SPOILER SO BEWARE: Pizza Girl has a pretty sever drinking problem along with her emotional problems and is pregnant), but boy do I love broken people and daring storylines written by authors who are willing to take risks and realize they are going to turn a lot of people off with their chosen subject matter, and coming of age stories, and I definitely loved that I got these types of vibes . . . .



But only in a bleaker way since I sort of live for fictional misery. It also helped that I went into this with suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper low expectations after really not enjoying Convenience Store Woman (which this is compared to in the blurb) and then being surprised that I actually did like it.

Obviously YMMV.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 3 out of 5]

Audiobook... narrated by
Jeena Yi

“Pizza Girl”, by Jean Kyoung Frazier had a catchy beginning.
But quickly I grew disenchanted.

I was getting nauseous from
the many empty calorie food concoctions: red licorice twisters, ice cream with Cheetos, cookies, candy, hot dogs. tacos, peanut butter. coke, and coffee, to name a ‘few’.

Reviewer, *Danielle*, described this book as a “Train Wreck”.
Danielle says:
“Do you like watching paint dry?? If yes, this book is for you! Too harsh? Whoever wrote the synopsis to this book that included the words
‘funny’ and ‘charmingly dysfunctional’, needs to re-examine a thing or two. A drunk, pregnant, crazy stocker is not funny IMHO”.
Go, Danielle! Amen!!

Vomiting blood isn’t funny either!!! -I can’t stand scenes in books or movies that has a lot vomiting.

Nose scratching — sore backs—broken arms - more diet cokes - a couple more cases of beer—

Yep... I’m with Danielle - this book is a train wreck.....
entertaining in it’s own miserable way- but not particularly nutritious for our bodies or brain.
On that note....I’m
going to make Paul and I a large fresh salad for dinner tonight.

A little endearing -
A little pathetic -
A little eye rolling -
A little sad, funny, entertaining...
but also .....
a little tedious &
enough already!

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

You could call this book darkly funny, but I think that's an oversimplification. It is sometimes funny, but you can't ever get carried away by our protagonist's biting humor. Because under it all she is deeply unhappy. She has just finished with high school and is unexpectedly pregnant, living with her mother and boyfriend, who are both excited and thrilled about the pregnancy. She is not. She works at a pizza place and that is where she meets Jenny, a mother who calls in with an unusual order, and then becomes our protagonist's obsession.

This is going to be a tough read for a lot of people. Our protagonist is very loved but that love makes her feel suffocated. She makes bad choices (it is incredibly rare to have someone in a book drink while pregnant who isn't supposed to be there just as an addict and cautionary tale, it will make you uncomfortable) and even while you take hope from her budding relationship with Jenny, you know this isn't going to end well.

I wanted a little more from this, the more plot-driven parts can feel forced. But I enjoyed the voice and how boldly unapologetic it is.

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderfully gritty coming-of-age novel and although it's set in LA, not NYC, it somehow evoked a soundtrack by The Strokes in my mind (which is a compliment as I LOVE The Strokes). 18-year-old pizza delivery girl Jane (an anagram of Jean, the author's name) does not know what to do with her life - and she's pregnant. Her alcoholic father just passed away, her doting mother, a Korean immigrant, and her loving boyfriend try to take care of her, but Jane is overwhelmed by her situation and feels stuck and unable to communicate her pain and confusion, as she fears she will hurt the people she loves. When delivering pizza to Jenny, a client more than double her age, Jane develops a crush on the married woman that slowly becomes an obession, fed by her wish to escape and to explore her sexual identity...

Frazier shows that a topic that has been tackled countless times - the difficulties of becoming an adult - can be narrated in a fresh, absorbing way. Jane is a wonderful protagonist and unreliable narrator, messy and relatable. I read the whole book in one sitting, and I enjoyed every second of it. The tone oscillates between coolness, humor, and vulnerability, the many flashbacks also offer a glimpse into the mother's immigrant story as well as Jane's experiences growing up the daughter of a heavy alcoholic.

A great debut, and I hope Frazier will soom come up with a second effort.

[AsToldByKenya · Rating 4 out of 5]

ouuu the low overall rating for this book is kinda nasty. I like this book a lot. I totally understand what probably didn't work for some people. but even those things I can't imagine people hated SO bad. Imma say yall just didn't get it lol. This book is really nuanced and we get character that I feel is very rarely put into books even though it may be mistaken for "depressed girl sucks at life" but I found her to be layered.

[Paris (parisperusing) · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I had been thinking constantly about han, a feeling that had been killing generation upon generation of Korean people. According to Mom, han was born in the gut and rose to the chest. … Han was a sickness of the soul, an acceptance of having a life that would be filled with sorrow and resentment and knowing that deep down, despite this acceptance, despite cold and hard facts that proved life was long and full of undeserved miseries, "hope" was still a word that carried warmth and meaning. Despite themselves, Koreans were not believers, but feelers—they pictured the light at the end of the tunnel and fantasized about how lovely that first touch of sun would feel against their skin, about all they could do in wide-open spaces."

In Jean Kyoung Frazier's zany, heartfelt debut novel, an 18-year-old Asian American pizza delivery driver finds herself on the precipice of motherhood while writhing in grief after losing her alcoholic father. Itching to escape her greasy underpaying job and the touch of her mother and boyfriend’s smothering love, our pizza girl protagonist fixes her gaze on Jenny, a stay-at-home mom whose presence becomes the portal through which such freedoms seem within reach.

Whether it was her namelessness or otherness as just another millennial of color squandering her life under the sun-kissed promises of LA, I could not decide which plight plucked harder at my heart as I peeled back the pages on the most indecipherable teenage characters I’ve read in years. The only comparison that fondly comes to mind is Corvus of Richard Chiem’s King of Joy, in part because beating at the core of what appears to be a rather despondent, joyless young woman is a child questing after her father in the deep dark of beer bottles, through the revolving lives of the strangers she meets, and eventually, through the barrel of a gun. What makes Jean’s story so impossible to put down is that we will never see what’s coming before the trigger is pulled, before it is too late.

With Pizza Girl, Jean tenderly captures that purgatory of adolescence and adulthood in a scary yet wholehearted story of a young woman on the fringes of grief and desire. By the book’s ending, I could not deny Jean her flowers. If Young Adult and ‘Juno’ had a lovechild, it would be Pizza Girl. It would be gold.

If you liked my review, feel free to follow me @parisperusing on Instagram.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm disappointed in this because a lot of book friends I respect and have similar taste with loved this book. I however, did not. In the beginning, the nameless main character reminded me of Daria from the MTV show way, way back. I enjoyed the sarcasm and wry sense of humor. The book continuted but I struggled to keep interest in the book because not much happens. It's clear the MC didn't know what she wanted out of anything and was dealing with some very complex issues, but I don't feel like her obsession with Jenny was well explained? Neither was any issue that she could have been dealing with (grief, shock, sexual identity to name a few). I needed something to feel like following this character around and making bad decision after bad decision was worth it. You want to see some kind of growth or at least an understanding as to why someone behaves the way that they do. (At least I do!)

I definitely encourage you to read this - I guess it just wasn't for me.

Thanks to Libro.fm for the audio!

Review Date: 03/23/21

[Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you like novels that follow a character for just a brief moment of their life;
if you like messy protagonists who you can’t help but root for even as they make questionable decisions;
if you like Raven Leilani’s Luster or Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen,
then this novel is for you.

[Emily Coffee and Commentary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pizza Girl is a compelling look into loneliness, obsession, and the lengths we go to to feel seen. This novel captures the terror of uncertainty when faced with sudden adulthood and responsibility, as well as the bittersweet experience of motherhood in stunning detail; it is a story from the perspective of those on the outside looking in, wanting to be everywhere and nowhere at once, wanting connection but feeling the burden of vulnerability. Though short, this novel packs a punch, delivering a deeply moving portrait of mental health, grief, and facing responsibilities.

[Tiffany · Rating 1 out of 5]

What on earth did I just read..... Blech. Worst book I’ve read all year by far. I feel gross all over. Read at your own risk, the main character is despicable, and I can’t even qualify it by saying she redeemed herself or anything. Awful awful awful. The writing is fine, but the story itself is nonexistent and the character development .. well that’s nonexistent too. There’s zero redeeming qualities to this main character and her motivations, so I’ll give zero stars to this story too.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

An alcoholic sociopath stalks a pizza-delivery customer who has inexplicably tried to befriend her. I was looking for something to sink my teeth into and instead got a fast, unchallenging read that left me disturbed.

[Laura • lauralovestoread · Rating 5 out of 5]

I abandoned everything that I was reading temporarily and binge read Pizza Girl in one sitting last night, and I loved it! Told in such an honest, unusual way, with just enough humor, and I just loved this coming-of-age story.⁣
⁣
I don’t know what it is about oddball characters with wit that I gravitate towards so much, but the protagonist in this story really pulled me in. It’s weird and tender, and at every funny turn there’s also such unexpected rawness.⁣

*thank you Doubleday for the free copy! All opinions are my own

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I stared hard at every person I walked past. If they didn't tell me my shoes were untied, I cursed them in my head - '**** you, how dare you not warn a pregnant woman that she could fall' - and if they did tell me my shoes were untied, I cursed them in my head - '**** you, leave me alone, I can do whatever I want.'" -- the titular protagonist, on page 35

To paraphrase a sentiment from the late film critic Roger Ebert (tweaking it from directing a movie to writing a book) about a first-timer breaking onto the scene: "Now that we know Jean Kyoung Frazier can make a book like Pizza Girl, it's time for her to move on and make a better one. This book, the first from an obviously talented young writer, is like an exercise in style." Indeed, Pizza Girl has a fair amount of style, but it falls short on the substance and left me feeling unsatisfied at the conclusion.

The title character is a pregnant eighteen year-old Korean-American young woman living in LA's working-class suburbs with her widowed mother and her well-meaning boyfriend in the summer of 2011. (Her unreliable alcoholic father had passed away a few years earlier.) To help make ends meet - as mom is a Kmart sales clerk and boyfriend works for a landscaping crew - she takes a post-high school job working at a local pizzeria, making the food deliveries in her problematic Ford Festiva.

The plot is kicked into motion when 'PG' (she is actually not identified by her given name until the final chapter) meets a customer - a lonely and frazzled 30-ish housewife/mother with a finicky young son - during a phoned-in order and the subsequent delivery. The two women bond and begin an unusual relationship which appears pleasant at first - they both seem like they could use a friend - but then gets sort of off-kilter and then ultimately gets really alarming with the actions of one of them near the end. Pizza Girl seems to be either loved or hated by the GR ratings and reviews, but I'm splitting the difference here. I think the book would've been better served in a short story format or novella, but it's uncomfortably stretched out to nearly 200 pages. Author Frazier definitely has some raw talent, and it should be interesting to see what she'll serve up to us next. Check, please.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Han: a Korean term/ concept for an acceptance of having a life filled with sorrow and resentment. “

Pizza Girl” by Jean Kyoung Frazier follows Jane, the narrator, in her eighteenth year, pregnant, rudderless, and searching. Jane is sad, self-destructive, yet yearning for something to make her life happy.

I tend to judge a book by its cover, and hence I thought “Pizza Girl” would be a quirky fun protagonist like in “Lady Bird”. Alas, no such thing in the novel. Yet, I loved it all the same. Jane isn’t very likable, but she is easy to understand. All the characters in this novel are struggling and aching.

Jane doesn’t know what she wants out of life or what she wants to do with her life. She’s newly pregnant, living with her mother who works at Walmart, and the baby daddy who is a landscaper. Jane works at a Pizza restaurant only because a friend of hers convinced the owner to hire Jane. Jane is off-putting and didn’t impress Earl, the owner of the pizza joint. In fact, Jane scares most people by her energy of unhappiness.

Jane’s boyfriend, aka the baby-daddy is a sweet blond American boy who received a full academic scholarship to USC, which he foregoes to be with Jane and help raise their baby. He’s bright, adorable, and dedicated to Jane. Jane, prior to getting pregnant, was a bit more hopeful. The reader learns through the story that Jane’s father was a horrible drunk. He recently died and Jane hasn’t fully processed the death and her feelings about her father.

Jane is a delivery person for the pizza place. Every delivery she makes, she observes the lives of the people. She’s trying to grasp what other people’s lives are like. She’s looking for ideas of what life could be. One particular customer, Jenny, has a visceral effect on Jane. Jenny has her own issues and struggles that make Jane reflect on her own life and future. Jane grows a toxic relationship with Jenny. Although Jenny is an adult, she is so entrenched in her own problems she doesn’t take responsibility in her relationship with Jane.

All is not bleak. There is hopefulness in this story. Growing up is hard to do, and for Jane, it’s complicated with her teen pregnancy and her relationship with her alcoholic father. The characters are quirky and there is much dark humor. It’s a raw and emotional and will have the reader rooting for all the characters. It’s a true skill that an author can make unlikeable characters ones that the reader only hopes for the best.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Electric Literature says Pizza Girl is the "The Queer Slacker Pizza Delivery Novel We’ve Been Waiting For" and I'm not even sure I can say it better than that, but I'll try.

"Her name was Jenny Hauser and every Wednesday I put pickles on her pizza." And that's how the novel PIZZA GIRL begins. I've had this book on my radar but the comparisons to Moshfegh didn't make me want to try it - but it is one of the shortest books from the Tournament of Books longlist that I could get from the library without waiting.

The main character, whose name you don't know most of the time since it's all from her perspective, recently lost her father. She bonded with a classmate at a grief group and by the time the novel starts, he's moved in with her and her Mom because she is pregnant. She is 18 and is working part-time delivering pizzas in what I like to call "regular California." The most social interaction she has comes from the people she delivers pizzas to and the lives she comes up with for them.

I enjoyed (?) the read despite some heavy handed metaphors and some random narrative tangents (usually when the story would jump to someone else's drama at the pizza place - one I had to reread three times to figure out what happened) - the mother and boyfriend seem like good people but they are not able to stop the MC from spiraling, and that journey is the crux of the plot. In the E.L. article linked above, the author talks about the role of imagination in the MC's life and where that can go wrong, and it wasn't something I particularly zeroed in on but enjoyed thinking about after finishing the novel.

As far as the Tournament of Books goes, I'm not sure this is one of the top 16 reads, however I would love a match between this book and Jack by Marilynne Robinson. Both stories revolve around a slacker type character with people around them who can see the issues but not help. The writing and focus are entirely different but they actually have more in common than not.

[Berengaria · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 stars
*This review is a postcard from Outlier Island 🌴🍹📬*

short review for busy readers:
A slice-of-life novel about an 18-yr old, self-absorbed, awkward Millennial who delivers pizzas because she has no practical interests or ambitions. Lots of tedious life detail. Hardly anything happens until the very end, when she's forced to confront her bisexuality. Okay workplace fiction, but little else. (NO resemblance to Convenience Store Woman!!)

in detail:
I can well remember reading Douglas Coupland's Microserfs and thinking it said more about my generation -- Generation X -- than any novel I'd ever read. It may not be a 5-star novel, but I loved it for what it was.

"Pizza Girl" is probably the Millennial version.

Unfortunately, our focus character, Jane, with her myriad of Millennial problems is a right little pill. She's a self-absorbed, shallow individual who runs on urge, not thought nor emotion. We get the feeling, she doesn't know why she does what she does, and doesn't want to think about why, so she stumbles amoeba-like through her life.

The plot here is wafer thin. Almost nothing happens until the last 40 pages when all sorts of stuff happens in a squishy mess. It has a fairly standard older gay lit trope of queer wigs out and holds a gun on the parter of the person they're interested in and seems like way too much, way too late.

Oh yeah, and she's just found out she's pregnant, so what does she do? That's right -- starts chugging the beer. Foetal Alcohol Syndrome? Ever heard of it, Jane? If she has, she just doesn't care what it will do to the baby, or her loving boyfriend and mother. She needs to drink, so she'll stand outside a supermarket begging older people to buy her alki because drink she will!

The only thing I really appreciated about the story was that Jane is mixed race Korean-American, and yet racism and "not fitting in to white America" appears nowhere. Jane is like anybody else. Her racial heritage plays virtually no role in her life (unlike her bisexuality). That was VERY refreshing.

I'm an outlier here, as I found the novel tedious and stagnant for long stretches. But if there are any Millennials who say "man, this is soooo us," I'd completely believe them.

I got my Microserfs; you can have your Pizza Girl.