I loved this book. It was refreshing to read a book about a girl my age that doesn’t romanticise being skinny and instead of ‘fixing’ the main character’s body issues, it shows her emotional journey of coming to terms with it, which I loved. The romance was really cute too, but I loved the fact that Lori’s sibling was autistic; I feel as though you rarely get to see the perspective of someone on the spectrum’s sibling, and it was interesting to see. I loved this book and how it dealt with certain issues, and I highly recommend it to anyone! Thank you so much to netgalley and penguin random house for the ARC of this book.

Lori Palmer has a lot of problems. As a big child, she has experienced her fair share of bullying. So much so that she has had to move schools and have therapy to address some of the trauma that entailed. Now there is more. Settled into a school she loves, with a career as an artist mapped out, she has a great support network in Johannesburg, but her mother decides to move Lori and her brother to Cape Town for a fresh start. Reeling from her divorce, she wants to rebrand herself and start a new business. The move is also for Lori's brother, who is autistic and needs a different, supportive kind of school that will allow him to flourish. Lori loves her brother, and in fact, since the divorce, has been caring for him pretty much on her own. She knows it's the right thing to do for him, but Cape Town with its jock mentality high school full of sporty, skimpily clad kids is not for her. Lori begins to flounder and with her mother increasingly distant and her brother unable to provide the support she needs, she has to find a way to make a life for herself in a place she believes doesn't want her. There are a lot of great things about this novel. The body positivity angle is fantastically and sensitively handled and it is brilliant to see sexiness and love being bestowed upon people who are not size zero. The neurodiversity angle is also well handled and a lovely touch. My only criticism is that there are so many great ideas in this novel that some of them get squeezed and I ended up feeling short changed. I wanted more about the political elements that the author touches on and more about Lori's art and those angles felt rushed amongst everything else. But it was very enjoyable nonetheless.