Self-doubt, small-town issues, beauty pageants and Dolly Parton. These four things can sum up Julie Murphy’s colorful young-adult novel “Dumplin.’”

Set in Clover City, Texas, “Dumplin’” revolves around a plus-size teenage girl named Willowdean, Will for short, as she deals with the typical problems of adolescence – losing your childhood best friend, self-doubt about her appearance, and falling in love with the wrong guy – alongside the lingering grief from the death of her aunt, Lucy, the only person who was a true motherly figure to Will. Why? Because Will’s actual mother, Rosie, cares more about their small town’s pride and joy, the Miss Teen Blue Bonnet pageant.

More specifically, Rosie is part of the pageant committee, and because pageant season is right around the corner, she spends the entire summer prepping for the pageant, barely even paying attention to her daughter. At first, they stay out of each other’s way, but when Rosie begins clearing out Lucy’s former bedroom, things become incredibly tense between Rosie and Will due to Rosie placing the pageant over everything, including her own family.

Over the summer, Will experiences a massive falling out with her best friend, Ellen, El for short, over El becoming best friends with a not-so-nice girl named Callie. The two grow incredibly distant, and El simply becomes a meaner person to Will in the process. All of this is bolstered by Callie being an incredibly vitriolic person to Will during this entire thing.

As this is going on, Will falls in love with one of her co-workers at the fast-food restaurant where they both work. Bo Larson, a basketball player at the local private school, becomes her boyfriend over the summer but Will breaks it off because Bo is embarrassed to be dating her. Their story continues, though, because Will is incredibly conflicted about dating Bo, especially because she finds herself in an incredibly awkward relationship with a football player, Mitch.

All of these stories come crashing together when Will finds a very unexpected item in one of her late aunt Lucy’s drawers – a blank pageant application. Then and there, Will decides to do the impossible – enter the beauty pageant. When she does this, she inspires three other misfits at her school – Hannah, a half-Dominican girl with buck teeth, Amanda, a girl who is forced to wear corrective shoes due to a deformity, and Millie, an obese girl who has always wanted to enter the pageant. Together, these ladies prove the book’s biggest message – you don’t have to be considered perfect to be beautiful.

The book isn’t actually driven by plot, though. It’s driven by its strong and fully developed characters and that is something I very much appreciate. The book’s plot is incredibly simple, yet Murphy develops it into something beautiful thanks to these strong characters. Every last one of these characters is incredibly relatable in someway or another. We will lose a best friend, we will have an awkward relationship, we will get picked on due to how we look, but above all, we will have a circle of friends we can all relate to and confide in.

The writing style, though it is a young-adult book, is actually very well-developed and flows quite well. Not one plot element or characterization falls apart in any of the book’s 61 chapters at all, and that is paramount in a book with many intersecting subplots like “Dumplin.’”

Though “Dumplin’” is a good book, it isn’t the best one. Some events are rushed through in one or two paragraphs, while others are dragged out for way too long. One example of this is a scene with Callie and Will in the bathroom at school and Callie is so excessively cruel to Will. That scene could’ve been shortened a bit, plus a few others, but aside from this, “Dumplin’” is a strong, relatable story about not fitting in, adolescence, and being beautiful in your own unique way.

IN SHORT:
Plot: 8/10
Characters: 9/10
Prose: 9.5/10
Themes: 10/10