The unnamed protagonist in Pizza Girl is an 18 year old Korean-American working delivering pizzas. Having graduated high school with little direction she finds herself pregnant and aimless, until one day she meets a customer, a middle aged woman called Jenny who has a young son who requests pickles on his pizza. "Pizza girl" delivers Jenny's pizza and becomes more and more obsessed with her, gradually ingratiating herself into her life to the detriment of her other relationships with her mother and boyfriend. Pizza girl's father also recently passed away, and she is struggling to process this loss, yet to those around her she seems apathetic to her life and situation - her boyfriend is looking at applying to college while she is struggling to hold down her minimum wage job which she only got through the help of a friend.

Despite the heavy themes I found this to be a hopeful - if offbeat - coming of age story. Yes, Pizza girl turns to drink whilst pregnant whilst grieving her father's death (he was an alcoholic and they had a fraught relationship) but the novel shows the importance of love, family and friendship in a realistic and non cliched way. I found the dialogue to be incredibly - sometimes a bit too - true to life, messy and un-sugar coated in a way authors often fail to achieve. Recommended!

Pizza Girl is the story of a pregnant pizza delivery girl who becomes obsessed with a woman she delivers pizzas to. The protagonist is eighteen, lives with her mother and overly doting boyfriend, and works delivering pizzas whilst avoiding thinking about the future, whether that's her baby or what she's going to do beyond each day. When Jenny, a mother whose son demands pickle-covered pizzas, orders from the pizza shop, the protagonist becomes obsessed with delivering their weekly pizza and seeing Jenny, but this doesn't bring her stability either.

This book has a similar feel to other modern novels with a young, lost protagonist who makes questionable choices and obsesses over a particular thing or person. In Pizza Girl, this is used to look at young pregnancy, grief, and living in denial of your worries and future, and it makes for a gripping novel that has a sense of drifting through just as the main character drifts through her life. You have to watch as she cuts everyone out of her life and feelings, falls down the rabbit hole of obsession with a married woman who is constantly moving house, and thinks about the death of her father and the bad side of him. Not a huge amount happens, but that's the point in many ways, and it feels like a well-crafted narrative.

Unexpectedly moving, Pizza Girl will appeal to fans of books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation where you watch a flawed protagonist deal (or fail to deal) with their life, but with an underlying look at the problems they face.

You get to see a lot of things when being a pizza girl. You see some of the best and the worst parts of the human race in all in one shift. In the case of Pizza Girl, it seems like everyone's life is perfect except for her own. This is where Jenny Hauser comes into the picture, the customer who becomes more of an unhealthy obsession which occupies most of her thoughts.

This book can be described as being more of a creative piece, which is almost like a chameleon in the sense of the ever-changing thoughts of the main character and what society can perceive of us. If you like a story which is happy and jolly, this is not for you. There were times when the main character was simply cringe-worthy. The best way to describe it is when you watch a film and a character makes a bad decision and all that happens is an awkward silence from all the other characters in the room. However, its that moment that even though it is so bad to watch, you still have the feeling that you have to watch it, even though you are gritting your teeth the whole way through.

Would I say that Pizza Girl is a good character? Probably not. Then again we are so used to having character development in a good light that we tend to forget that not all character development can be seen to be good. In 'Pizza Girl' we find the main character making many decisions which can be seen as being a no no. This can show some of the mental health aspects that there are to being in a situation that the main character is in. Not everyone can handle it. But it just made me feel like I wanted to shake her and tell her to wake up and smell the coffee. How can anyone be truly that bad at life? One minute she decides to do something good and the next she forgets and does the bad thing instead.

I'm not quite sure what the big deal is about this book. Maybe because it is more abstract that the usual book? Or it highlights many issues that some people deal with in life? That we are all on the hamster wheel and we just don't know how to get off? That really we are all just a number and not an individual? Well, whatever the true meaning of this book is, I really hope that there is someone out there who is able to understand it better than I do. Until then, I have given it a two star.

This story wasn't really what I expected. It is more complicated and deeper than I thought. I didn't know I will end up with a dark story after reading the description of the book. Although dark stories are not my usual reading, I was surprisingly enthralled into the story. Sometimes, it has an unusual effect on me. It gave me the feeling as if I'm looking at the ceiling fan spinning around while falling into my thoughts. This is a great debut novel for the author, and I hope readers who love dark stories will appreciate better than me.

The funny part is I just realised that this book should be funny, based on the description of this book on Goodreads. I admit there are times that the narrator has wild or unusual imaginations, but I never felt the story is funny. Probably I read this book too seriously because what I felt throughout the entire story is melancholy. When I reached the part about the awkwardness and cold treatment from her former schoolmates, and her partner questioning her about college applications and the future, there was a rush in me feeling wanted to cry for her. The feeling of overwhelmed or daunted by the future, and it makes me feel scared when thinking that she has a different path than her peers at that stage. I wish I can be her supportive friend, but to be honest, I don't know how to help her in a way that she wants.

Random thought. The idea for "The Helpful Sheep" game reminds me of a game that I played a few months ago. The game is called "Dropsy", which it's about a clown that goes around the town helping others, and in return, he will get a hug from them. I'm wondering whether the author plays that game before, but it's ironic that a similar concept of a game comes from two different people appearing in a different form.

Thanks to NetGalley and HQ for providing me with a free review copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

3.5 - This was a really quick and easy read which I finished in one sitting. I liked the authors writing style and the book is from our main characters point of view. I love stories with questionable characters but there really weren’t many likeable characters in this except for maybe the boyfriend Billy. It was only just over 200 pages so we only really scratched the surface but was an enjoyable fast paced book.

Thank you to NetGalley and HQ for an ecopy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier is a fresh, tender, raw, honest and relatable novel about a young woman dealing with grief and with her feelings of overwhelming ambivalence about impending motherhood and what her future might look like.

I'm not sure where to even start when describing Pizza Girl as I think it's best to go into this one knowing absolutely nothing. This follows an eighteen-year-old pregnant girl who works at a pizza place and forms a connection with a customer who orders pickles on her pizza every Wednesday.

This is a short, slice-of-life book where we as readers follow 'pizza girl' as she is all-consumed by this customer. Normally I would say that it wasn't as enjoyable because it was too short and there wasn't enough development in the plot and characters. However, I think this book was written perfectly and does exactly what it intends to do. The writing is clever and the plot is original. In such a short period of time, you feel emotionally connected to our protagonist and understand all of the things she is feeling towards her boyfriend, her mother, the customer and the lost of her father. And yet we root for her even when she makes the wrong choices.

You don't find out the protagonists name until the last few pages and yet I was still satisfied with the ending of this unique, thought-provoking book.

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 a simple coming-of-age tale.

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 state of millennial ennui.

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.

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).

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'.

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'.