Liza Palmer

REVIEWED BY CPA MOM

Conversations with the Fat Girl

List Price: $12.95

Paperback: 328 pages

Publisher: 5 Spot (September 13, 2005)

Publisher Comments: In this witty debut, 27-year-old Maggie learns that sometimes a person does outgrow her favorite pair of old jeans and her oldest, thin-by-gastric-bypass-surgery friend.

From Publishers Weekly: Palmer debuts with the latest sprightly entry in the ever-expanding category of light romantic comedies starring plus-sized heroines. Maggie has been best friends with fellow fat girl Olivia since they were 12. Following gastric bypass surgery at 22, however, Olivia grows increasingly unrecognizable. Now 27, she's engaged to Adam, a fat-phobic Ken doll, and although Maggie is to be the maid of honor, she feels less and less a part of Olivia's skinny new life. After Olivia disappoints her old friend again and again, Maggie sets in motion a long-overdue and explosive confrontation and walks into the arms of the colleague—busboy to her barista—whom she's had a crush on for ages. By that time, in true chick-lit style, Maggie is both earnestly at work improving herself and being loved for her true, unimproved self. And though Palmer doesn't moralize, it's when Maggie starts to make her own, more realistic wishes come true—by taking a better job and signing up with a trainer instead of a surgeon—that she sees her love requited. It turns out her instincts were good—as are Palmer's.

 Seeing Me Naked

List Price: $13.99

Paperback: 320 pages

Publisher: 5 Spot (January 8, 2008)

Back cover: Elisabeth Page has big shoes to fill. She's the daughter of living legend novelist Ben Page, and the sister of literary wunderkind Rascal Page, and her career as a pastry chef is decidedly not up to her family's snooty standards-even if she works at the hottest restaurant in L.A. Elisabeth hopes no one will notice that her five-year plan to run her own patisserie has morphed into an eleven-year plan to nowhere. Her personal life is also frozen in time: she's still involved with her family-approved childhood sweetheart, a journalist whose constant jaunts leave her lonely. Enter an exciting career opportunity and even more terrifying, Daniel Sullivan, a beer-drinking basketball coach who is everything her family is not. Addicted to control and bred to criticize, can Elisabeth finally embrace happiness? Only if she has the guts to let others see her naked…and let them love her, warts and all. (read excerpt from chapter one here)

My take: What can I tell you about these books? I am not a professional book reviewer. I don't write things like "consider it haute chick lit; Palmer's prose is sharp, her characters are solid and her narrative is laced with moments of graceful sentiment" (from a review of Seeing Me Naked by Publishers Weekly). To be honest, I'm not even sure what that means and I have two college degrees! So for these books, I'm going to take the advice of the ab-fab founders of Mother-Talk who I've done some book reviews for - their guidelines for book reviews says: "we don’t want reviews that sound professional or worthy of the New York Times. We’re just a bunch of moms talking to other moms — that’s why we’re called “MotherTalk”!".

I just really liked reading Ms. Palmer's books. Why? Mainly because I could relate to the characters. Now I may be staring 40 in the face these days but I still remember what it's like to be in my 20's with all the accompanying angst about live, love and career. About trying to live up to impossibly high paternal expectations like Elisabeth in Seeing Me Naked (and being just as anal as she is). And Maggie from Conversations with the Fat Girl, well, let's just say I've been "the fat girl" my entire life. Ms. Palmer is such a gifted writer that I felt like she popped inside my head from those early days of adulthood and then wrote books about it. Her characters are very honest and real - I found myself really caring about what happened next while reading and not wanting to put the books down. Do I recommend them? Hell YES! And I can't wait for her next book either. 5 out of 5 binkies.

About the Author: Liza Palmer was born and bred in Pasadena, California. After dropping out of college, she held every degrading job imaginable until she finally realized the only talent she had was writing. Her debut novel, Conversations with the Fat Girl, launched Warner's 5Spot line in September, 2005 and went on to become an international bestseller. Conversations with the Fat Girl has also recently been optioned by HBO for a series. Her second novel, Seeing Me Naked, was released in January, 2008 in the US and April, 2008 in the UK. Her latest novel, A Field Guide to Burying Your Parents, will be published in 2009.