Thursday, January 28, 2010

WINTERGIRLS by Laurie Halse Anderson - REVIEW

Lia fights a war every day.

A war with herself.

A war with food.

At 95 pounds she still feels fat. When she looks in the mirror she sees the pockets of fat hanging on her body. Everyone else is just blind. Two stays in a treatment facility hasn’t cured her; it just forced her to develop techniques to survive in a world of food. She picks the bruised apples at lunch so she has an excuse to cut some of it off, she sews quarters in the lining of her robe to add weight when she has to stand on the scale in front of her stepmother, and she cuts herself – just little cuts in order to let the pain leak out of her body.

When Lia learns that Cassie, her best friend, has been found dead in a motel room, maintaining any healthy habit is extremely difficult. Not only does she have to listen to her own voice obsessing about every calorie of food she consumes; now she has to deal with Cassie making her ghostly appearances and cheering her on and encouraging her to get skinnier so Lia can join Cassie on the “other side.”

Lia must decide where she wants to be – in the world with the living or stuck in the frozen world where she has trapped herself.

Laurie Halse Anderson has done it again. With this being the tenth anniversary of the release of SPEAK, it is a wonderful time for WINTERGIRLS to debut. It is an extremely powerful and honest look at the life of an anorexic girl. You will be choked up and at a loss for words by the time you get to the final page.



3 comments:

  1. wow..this sounds like an emotional read. I will have to pick this book up! thanks for the great review!

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  2. Awesome review! I definitely want to get this one...I read Speak and was blown away! Can't wait to read it!!!

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  3. I love this book. It's amazing. The writing is absolutely beautiful, and I felt like I was on the journey with Lia. It's a hard one to read, but one of my favorites.

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