Book Review: Speed Shrinking
Speed Shrinking by Susan Shapiro
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Speed Shrinking is the story of self-help author Julia Goodman. Julia’s addictive personality is under control until her best friend gets married and moves away, her therapist also moves away, and her husband goes out of town for an extended period for work. Julia falls apart and goes on several cupcake binges. Now she might look fat when she goes on tour for her latest book, which is about overcoming food addiction. Julia decides she needs a new therapist to fix her up.
I read this book for my book club. The woman in my book club who picked it chose it because it had several blurbs on the back promising that it was a “laugh-out-loud delight” and “hilarious”. None of us in book club found this book even mildly amusing, let alone laugh-out-loud funny. Julia is so self-absorbed and obsessive that she is completely unlikeable. Her interactions with her therapists are repetitive and get her (and the reader) nowhere. She never really learns to dig deeper and end her superficial obsession with the numbers on the scale.
This book is the first work of fiction by Susan Shapiro, who has written several self-help books herself. It reads like a memoir and I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s autobiographical. If that’s the case, I wish the author would have just written a memoir instead of trying to present this book as a lighthearted, funny chick-lit book. Cause that it ain’t.
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