Book Review: Wintergirls | Laurie Halse Anderson

 

Time: 7:15A.M CST

Temp: Don’t know other than it is hella cold…

Weather: Cold, Clear

Location: In my bed room listening to the "Michigan" Album by Sufjan Stevens, trying to talk myself into doing all the housework I need to catch up on but so overwhelmed I don’t know where to start.

This is the 010  Day of 2010 Happy Birthday to me. I’m 33 La la dee dee yeepee…

 

Book Review: "Wintergirls" | Laurie Halse Anderson
 

 Title: Wintergirls
By: Laurie Halse Anderson
Obtained: NLS/BARD book number DB-69104
Type: Unabridged Audio
Read by: Annie Wauters
Reading Time: 6Hours 26Minutes 

Library of Congress Annotation: 
Lia’s estranged best friend Cassie is found alone in the Gateway Motel–dead, after calling Lia thirty-three times. While Lia feels guilty for not acting to prevent Cassie’s death from bulimia, she continues to struggle with her own anorexia and self-mutilation. For junior and senior high readers. 2009.

Publisher’

"Dead girl walking," the boys say in the halls.

"Tell us your secret," the girls whisper, one toilet to another.

I am that girl.

I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through.

I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.

Lia and Cassie were best friends, wintergirls frozen in matchstick bodies. But now Cassie is dead. Lia’s mother is busy saving other people’s lives. Her father is away on business. Her stepmother is clueless. And the voice inside Lia’s head keeps telling her to remain in control, stay strong, lose more, weigh less. If she keeps on going this way – thin, thinner, thinnest – maybe she’ll disappear altogether.

In her most emotionally wrenching, lyrical book since the National Book Award finalist Speak, best-selling author Laurie Halse Anderson explores one girl’s chilling descent into the all-consuming vortex of anorexia.
©2009 Laurie Halse Anderson; (P)2009 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Note: Publisher’s description from Audible.com

My Thoughts:

PROS:
Quick read
Interesting nice pace

Cons: some of the writing is a bit odd to listen too.  There are a lot of bits that go stupid slash bitch slash baby slash… on and on like that and one whole chapter consisted of the words "Must Not Eat" punctuated in random ways. It went on like that for a good five mintues…
At first the book is hard to follow because of the oddness in grammer but once you catch on it isn’t too bad.
I couldn’t put this book down.  Granted it is rather short, but still It only took me part of an afternoon and most of an evening to read and that was with many interuptions.

Mrs. Anderson ‘s portrail of the girls in this book is dead good.  These girls could be anyone’s girls.  My teenage step daughters, their friends, and their classmates.  The sad thing is???  I bet you there really are girls like this in every grade, jr. and high school out there.

Eating disorders are very serious and sad.  It is a pretty crap world when children as young as nine, ten, eleven…  Feel they are ugly because they are chubby.  They’re kids! Babies they have baby fat.  Teenagers don’t have the full ability to look at the big picture and can only see the trees directly around them.  So they don’t know that the body they have at ten or eleven or fifteen isn’t the same body they’ll have at thirty, or fourty.

Also the media, although not targeted in this book, but from what I observe the media is to blame for so many sad girls starving themselves for socalled perfection.  That lean hungry pissed off cat look seems to be in and healthy happy content is not in.  Mrs. Anderson’s descriptions of when Lia is breaking with reality brings the reder as close to a break with reality as one can get without being busted on to a psych ward.

Rattings:

Writing 4.5 of 5
Reading: 5 of 5
Over all 4 of 5