Pizza Girl

This is so punk rock. While I finish another Asian-American novel wrestling with notions of identity, navigating micro-aggressions and the weighty calculus of being a “model minority” I get to follow it up with this debut from queer Korean-American Jean Kyoung Frazier. Her Korean-American protagonist Pizza Girl is 18 and pregnant. She's not wringing her hands about what it means to be bi-racial and raise a child who will technically be more white than Korean, or worrying about how her dopey white boyfriend and her Korean mother will get along (great actually). Instead she's a bit on the brink and actively trying to blow up her own life. She's sneaking off to her dead father's shed in the middle of the night to drink beers and watch infomercials. She's working pizza delivery and has maybe developed a bit of a crush on a middle-aged suburban mom who requested pickles on her pizza to placate her 7-year old son. It's an L.A. slacker novel that happens to revolve around a queer Korean-American girl I didn't know I wanted. While other writers are thanking George Saunders and Uma Thurman, Frazier is shouting out Tallboy who tackled the California neon cover based on a pizza shirt he designed that she owns. Frazier's just out here living her best life and I'm here for it.