It's hard not to fall in love with the narrator of Big Girl Small. It's not so much that she's smart or articulate. Sure, there's that. It's more that she has a perspective on the world around her, and it's not always consistent. And, I always think that's what makes a narrator (or a person) worth loving. Because you can see them learning. Trying to pull in the various things they think so that they have a view of the world, a view that become more and more complete and well-rounded.

The narrator, Judy, is a Little Person. And, with that, there's an object for the awkwardness that everyone I know felt in high school. There's a really wonderful scene in the book, where the narrator, Judy, climbs up onto a bed. And, for her, it is climbing. And she does the math of it, the pulling down the shirt, wondering if she can do it without help, the pressing of the hands on the bed to lift herself up. All of that. And it's great. Because that's how everybody feels. But DeWoskin provides an object, a real difference, for that feeling. It's wonderful. All the scenes that pull that together are a reminder of high school in a way that is uncomfortable, real, and provides a way for the narrator to show off her difference, and the ways she is the same.

The suspense in the novel comes in finding out The Big Terrible Thing that happened to Judy. The thing that moves her to a motel, that prompts newscasts about her. It does not take much time or imagination to figure out the category of The Big Terrible Thing, and waiting to find out the details, waiting for the timeline of the readers' view and the narrators to merge, gets tiresome.

And at first, when I read what came next, I was disappointed. And the ending is a disappointment. But I was disappointed because I thought, well, it's what comes after The Big Terrible Thing that a girl needs to know. And everything that's important happened off stage.

I'm the parent of a girl. And I can't control, no matter how much I want to, I can't control what comes before The Big Terrible Thing. The decisions, big and small, that led to it. But I can help respond. Maybe that's why what happens after is so important to me. But when my daughter reads this, when she's older and she reads this, maybe it's what comes before that will really matter to her.