Review of Piglet by Lottie Hazell

*Piglet* by Lottie Hazell (2024). Published by Henry Holt and Co.

If you’re new here and found this blog through the mysterious powers of the Internet, welcome! My name is Ashley, and I’m a dedicated reader and movie watcher who thought to turn this website into a little digital archive of sorts.

I was watching and reading so much that I wanted to keep track of it all, so I began blogging as a way to keep these books as memories somewhat forever.

That said, I recently fell into a period of unemployment, and this blog was a solace for me. Not only was it a way to make a little bit of money when there was nothing else coming my way really, but I found, after getting my finances in order, that I enjoyed sitting down to write blog posts when I had nothing else to do in my day.

If you like this review in the end, feel free to click around. This is my digital home, so I’m happy to have you here. This blog post is probably coming out a few months after I wrote it due to the sheer nature of the backlog I have right now.

Because of the nature of this blog, I often get sent review copies of books. I often turn down the physical copies because I don’t want to waste my space and resources, but I often have a handful or two of digital advance copies I need to get through. Sometimes I stress about getting through them, then realize I cannot get to one or two by the time the book comes out.

I often get through all of them, but one of the books I didn’t manage to get through was Piglet. Or so I thought. Turns out I had read the book before, forgot about it, then picked it up months later. I don’t know how I forgot about this and didn’t log the book on Goodreads, but when I got to the ending I re-realized I had read this before.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much, as I know the introductions of blog posts can get a bit lengthy and boring.

A woman named Piglet becomes increasingly obsessed with food as she loses control of her life and upcoming marriage.

The title of this book comes from the name of the character: we don’t really get to know her by her actual name, but she is instead referred to as Piglet. This is an unfortunate reference to how, throughout the book, she resorts to binge eating in order to cope with her life. The nickname came from childhood, as this is what people call her.

Everything seems to be going well for her in the beginning. She has a very nice fiance that is quite the catch, she has a job as a London publishing house and works as a cookbook editor, and she has some great friends who will die for her. But then everything starts to fall apart when her fiance confesses something terrible two weeks before the wedding.

We see her spiraling as she’s preparing to get married to her fiance still. She has doubts about the wedding after that, confession and this manifests with her behavior later on in the book. We do eventually get to the wedding, that’s a spoiler that isn’t too much, but this might be the beginning of the end for her when we do get there.

One of the big ways that Piglet begins to descend into her poor mental health is through hunger. When he confessed, Piglet finds herself with a ravenous appetite, and she starts engaging with her binge eating behavior. At one point, during her lunch break, she even leaves her office behind and orders a ridiculous amount of food from a restaurant.

As all of this is happening, Piglet finds increasing pressure from her family and everything going on in work. She’s also trying to make the perfect cake for the wedding, but is unable to find herself focusing throughout all of this, and ends up making a poor version of a recipe each time she tries to create something she’s happy with.

This might be a novel about a woman’s madness, as we would call it a hundred years ago, but it shows about how she comes to the slow revelation that she doesn’t need to put up with everything she does.

In some ways, once we get past the self-destructive behavior, it’s all about her learning to be happy with her life and herself. She doesn’t have to be complacent to what other people want, and there’s quite the character arc with this journey for her.

Overall Thoughts

So this is a book that’s very much about an eating disorder, even though it doesn’t advertise itself as such. There rich, decadent descriptions of the food that Piglet is eating, but even the nickname feels a bit cruel when other people are granting her that name and not herself.

The writing itself is fine, but I don’t think this was the book for me. I could see how other people might love it more than I did, but as someone who struggled with the exact opposite kind of eating disorder at one point, it can be a little triggering at times. I’m glad she has an ending where she can have some peace, but getting there is quite the trial.

Pick it up if you’re interested in the plot and character arc. I think you might find it more valuable than I did in the world, especially with representation, but it simply wasn’t the book for me. And that’s alright—it’s the book for someone else out there in the world.

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