Lia and Cassie are the wintergirls in the title. They both have eating disorders. Or rather, Cassie has an eating disorder- Bulimia. Lia has a not-eating disorder- Anorexia. It opens with Cassie's death. It closes with another death.
I couldn't finish this book. It just is too much like pulling my ribs out of my chest and stabbing myself in the gut with them. It's written brutally, because a long, intimate look inside the head of someone who honestly hates herself and her body can only ever be hard to deal with.
I've had this issue hit my family twice, and I just can't take visiting that place again for the amount of time required to finish the book. So I didn't finish it. But, I did give it three stars out of five, for the part I read. It appears to be very well written, so if you want a closer understanding of what it's like to measure your worth by how little you weight- no other indicators are valid- I'd recommend checking it out.
2 comments:
I'm a little curious what audience these kinds of books are meant for. The only good audience I can think of is people who need to be aware of these disorders, and what they're like. But people have had the problem, or know people who have, it seems like it would just be something they wouldn't want to see in fiction. But I'm in the fiction-as-escapism camp so who knows.
Hmmmm, true. I think it gets assigned in schools a lot, as a lot of her works are. But yeah, people read about horrifying things for fun, which I just don't understand. *shakes head*
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