Press — Sarai Walker

Book Reviews

“Hilarious, surreal, and bracingly original, Walker's ambitious debut avoids moralistic traps to achieve something rarer: a genuinely subversive novel that's also serious fun…Part Fight Club, part feminist manifesto, an off-beat and genre-bending novel that aims high—and delivers.”
—Kirkus, starred review

Read DIETLAND "not only because it's smart and timely...but because it's heartbreaking and tragic and very very comic (as long as you like your laughs dark) and because it will guarantee that you never look at a lipstick or a pair of stilettos or a bathroom scale the same way again. Sarai Walker is some kind of twisted sister. And of course I mean that as the highest possible compliment."
—Sara Nelson, Amazon Editors' Top Picks for the Best Books of May

"This novel is like a roller coaster. Before you know it, you're racing through an edgy and exciting mix of mystery, crime, and social critique of gender and beauty standards at breakneck speed. Vivid characters and sometimes surprising acts of violence make the story pop."
—Library Journal, starred review

"Walker's first novel leaves chick lit in the pixie dust, treading the rougher terrain of radical critique and shadowy conspiracies — territory closer to Rachel Kushner than Helen Fielding."
—Boris Kachka, Vulture

"If Amy Schumer turned her subversive feminist sketches into a novel, dark on the inside but coated with a glossy, palatable sheen, it would probably look a lot like Dietland — a thrilling, incendiary manifesto disguised as a beach read."
—Isabella Biedenharn, Entertainment Weekly

"Sarai Walker's debut novel does something few contemporary writers — whether green or seasoned — have managed to do well: Dietland is a searing feminist manifesto, a hardcore, politically-charged criticism of the unavoidable ills that plague women today. But, guess what? It's also fun."
—Caroline Goldstein, Bustle

"This is a fun, no-apologies-offered debut!"
—The June 2015 Indie Next List

“Through her protagonist, debut novelist Walker gives a plaintive yet powerful voice to anyone who has struggled with body image, feelings of marginalization, and sexual manipulation. Her robust satire also vibrantly redefines what it means to be a woman in contemporary society.”
—Carol Haggas, Booklist

"As a social commentary, "Dietland" is no shrill tirade. Ms Walker captures the misery of failing to fit in, to fit into the right clothes, to fit in with the right people and their expectations."
—The Economist

"It's vanishingly rare...to see a novel that looks like the much-maligned "chick lit" — and sometimes reads like it — so gleefully censorious of rape culture. If its satire is sometimes a little on-the-nose, it's only because real life, when you are talking about female grievances, is a dog's breakfast of things so terrible they hardly need to be satirized."
—Lydia Kiesling, The Guardian

"Dietland resonated with the part of me that wants, just once, to deck a street harasser. At the very least, I wish an incurable itch upon everyone who has catcalled me on the street. I wish food poisoning and public embarrassment on everyone I've heard make a rape joke...Which is to say, sometimes I forget I am angry, but I am. Dietland is a complicated, thoughtful and powerful expression of that same anger."
—Annalisa Quinn, NPR

"Alongside all the small ways women are taught to hate and fear and rue about ourselves, the larger issues represented in Dietland are all things we've been taught to strictly look away from and avoid. But I read this book in the span of two days, because facing these issues felt so real and truthful, like water in the desert. Like, finally someone's writing the words we need to read."
—Sulagna Misra, Hello Giggles

"This is the most original and exciting book I've reviewed in these pages...Buy this for yourself and then for all your friends - and let the discussion begin. I can't stop thinking about it."
—Sara Lawrence, The Daily Mail

"We're as mad as Hell and we're not going to take it anymore. It could be that Dietland is saying that the days of women trying to fit in are over."
—Cath Murphy, Lit Reactor

"The biggest flaw I see in Dietland is that the people who most need to read it never will."
—Karen Sandstrom, The Plain Dealer - Cleveland.com

"Dietland is...a scathing commentary on the superficiality of American culture."
—Charles R. Larson, Counterpunch

DIETLAND in UK Guardian

DIETLAND in Lenny Letter

DIETLAND in the New York Post — and here as well.

DIETLAND on the New York Daily News's summer reading list

DIETLAND in USA Today

DIETLAND in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram

DIETLAND in the Dallas Morning News

DIETLAND in Dame Magazine

DIETLAND in Readings