Rating: ★★★
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Piglettes is a fun and comedic story about three young girls who over the course of a summer, find friendship, adventure, and courage. It both follows the recent trend in ‘feminist’ YA whilst also feeling more light-hearted and warm than many others. The novel has been translated from French, and as you can probably tell from the cover art, it is a feel-good summer read.
Piglettes is about Mireille, Astrid, and Hakima, three teenage girls who are awarded the prizes for three ugliest girls in their school in a competition hosted by their classmates. Whilst Mireille has experienced this before and wears an armour of sarcastic pride, she takes the two younger newcomers to the gang under her wing. The girls are all very different, and they discover that they are all seeking different things. Mireille wants to find her biological father. Astrid wants to follow her favourite band wherever they go. Hakima want a chance to avenge her brother’s trauma in war. When the girls discover that there is a chance for all of them to achieve these goals in Paris, they set out on a journey to do so, and prove a point while they’re at it. They cycle to Paris selling homemade sausages along the way, and amass a loyal following, but more importantly, build strong bonds between themselves.
I loved the light-hearted comedy of this novel. Mireille is a brilliant narrator, and she genuinely made me laugh at times. Clementine Beauvais did a really good job at creating a unique voice for Mireille and it really brought the rest of the novel to life. It was easy to get to know Mireille as a character, whether through her witty jokes to the other girls or her sarky backchat with her mother and step-father, or even just reading her thoughts. I was also impressed at the breadth of issues that the novel explores despite keeping this light-hearted and funny tone. For example, the story of Hakima’s brother who suffered life-changing injuring serving in the army and is traumatised by what he sees as a failure on his part to save his friends.
This novel toed quite a thin line between being a ‘message’ book and being a light-hearted comedy. It was refreshing to read about three empowered young girls in an exciting story about proving others wrong and achieving their dreams without feeling like the author was waving a banner in your face. On the other hand, there were parts of the novel that seemed to drag on and without Mireille’s humorous narration, the novel would just have felt boring. Particularly, a sequence where the girls attend a party hosted by university students felt unnecessary and pointless. Further, there was little action or drama in the form of plot twists, and any tension or problems was quite low-level and so easy to ‘overcome’ for the characters.
Overall I still feel like the book as a whole works well enough. It is not particularly deep or serious, but not all books have to be. The characters set a goal and worked to achieve it. By the end of the novel, they had learned a great deal. I appreciated that the culmination of their stories is not necessarily what they were expecting at the beginning of the novel, and they came to terms with these new circumstances.
Ink Drops Books 