This book explores the struggles of an overweight woman to be accepted in society and to accept and love herself. Unfortunately, she never really achieves this, so it sends a pretty depressing message. It does demonstrate that, even if the weight is gone, the damage done by society's attitudes towards weight lingers. This is an important insight that overrides some of the book's flaws.

The book is well-written and a fairly fast read, but I didn't care for the "collection-of-short-stories-but-not-really" format, which I found disjointed. And while there was much to empathize with, it was sometimes challenging to empathize with Lizzie/Beth/Elizabeth, because she did not like herself much and didn't give the reader many reasons to like her, either.