Review: Wintergirls

Title:  Wintergirls

Author:  Laurie Halse Anderson

Published:  March 19, 2009

Page Count:  288

Genre:  Young Adult fiction

My Rating:  4.5/5

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.

Reading Wintergirls can not really be described as a pleasant experience.  Lia is a very, very sick girl who needs to come to terms with that fact and accept the help that everyone in her life wants to get for her.  But she can’t accept that.  She also can’t stop thinking about Cassie, Cassie who used to be her everything, Cassie who she didn’t speak to for several months, Cassie who called her that one night thirty-three times, Cassie who died not too long after that thirty-third phone call.  So Lia spends 99% of her time obsessing – either obsessing about Cassie, or obsessing about food.  And reading this book with Lia as the narrator, this girl who is thisclose to death, who is literally starving herself, is tough.  It breaks your heart to read her thoughts and feelings because you just want to hug her, you just want to help her, you just want her to help herself.  But she doesn’t… and you keep reading.  And the book keeps getting more uncomfortable.

Not to say that Wintergirls isn’t a fabulous book.  I actually found it to be pretty amazing.  It is kind of scary how well Anderson wrote this book… how well she could look into the mind of a girl suffering from anorexia.  From what I know of the disorder, Lia is an extremely accurate portrayal of an anorexic girl, which is probably why the book is so difficult to read.  Most of us (especially women) know someone who has, either now or in the past, suffered from an eating disorder.  If you don’t, well to be honest with you – you probably just haven’t found out yet.  I personally know several people who have struggled with various eating disorders over the course of the time I have known them.  Some of them are better now, some are not.  This book is so hard to read because it’s that same experience, that of being on the outside, of watching someone you love literally kill themselves slowly, and not being able to do a darn thing about it.  It’s  pretty terrifying.  

One thing that I especially loved about Wintergirls is how realistic the adults in the book were.  In many YA books, the parents are completely clueless and not at all good characters.  Even though Lia felt like her mom, dad, and stepmom were awful people who didn’t care about her, Anderson did a great job showing that they were kind and loving people who desperately wanted Lia to get help, but they just didn’t know HOW to help her.  The fact that Anderson was able to show this while still writing the characters through Lia’s eyes is remarkable to me, and it shows what an amazing writer she is.  

I highly recommend Wintergirls.  It is fabulously written, and even though it’s a difficult book to read, it’s got that bittersweet thing going on.  Once you begin reading it, you hope along with Lia’s parents that something will click for her and she’ll finally get some help… and you just keep reading, hoping and praying for that to happen.  Does it happen?  Well, I’m not telling… go read the book!!

More reviews -

• Devourer of Books
• Alicia at Confessions of a Bookaholic
• Shelly at Write for a Reader
• Alea at Pop Culture Junkie
• Reader Rabbit
• The Story Siren
• Natasha at Maw Books Blog
• Becky at Becky’s Book Reviews
• Frenetic Reader
• Amanda at A Patchwork of Books
• The Compulsive Reader

Review: Fever 1793

#6.  Fever 1793 – Laurie Halse Anderson

 Fever 1793 is the story of the 1793 epidemic of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania told from the perspective of a young girl, Mattie (Matilda).  Mattie lives a simple but very happy life which mainly consists of helping run the family coffee shop, along with her mother and grandfather.  When rumors of “the fever” begin sweeping the area, the family really isn’t sure what to expect.  But when Mattie’s mother shows signs of being ill, she orders Mattie and her grandfather to leave the city and the disease.  What Mattie finds is that there is just as much terror and disease outside the city as in it.  And she quickly realizes that it is up to her to figure out how to survive the epidemic.

In all honesty, I thought the novel was just okay.  I loved Speak, which was my introducation to Laurie Halse Anderson, and I love historical fiction, so I had expected to love Fever 1793.  The story was interesting enough, and it moved along rather quickly, but it took me way too long to become invested in the characters – and to care about what happened to them.  It was a worthwile read for me, though, because prior to my exposure to Fever 1793, I didn’t know there was a Yellow Fever epidemic in Philadelphia during that time period.  Also, I found the notes at the end of the book interesting and helpful – it’s always nice to learn something while reading for fun.  Overall, I feel like Fever 1793 was a decent book, just not one of my favorites.  I’d still recommend it, especially for young adults interested in history and/or medicine.

More reviews:

• Jenny at Shelf Love
• Becky at Becky’s Book Reviews

Review – Speak

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

From the back cover -

Melinda Sordino busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, so her old friends won’t talk to her, and people she doesn’t know hate her from a distance.  The safest place is to be alone, inside her own head.  But even that’s not safe.  Because there’s something she’s trying not to think about, something about the night of the party that, if she let it in, would blow her carefully constructed disguise to smithereens.  And then she would have to speak the truth.

My thoughts -

Like other bloggers have said about this book in the past, it’s a difficult book to say anything about because the main element to the story is something that’s hidden from the reader from the beginning and not revealed until close to the end of the book.  The great majority of this YA novel consists of Melinda’s thoughts and feelings as she goes through her freshman year of high school a complete outcast.  Obviously, as the summary implies, there’s something very big that caused Melinda to become such an outcast, but this something is a secret she’s keeping from everyone, her old friends, parents, teachers, even her guidance counselor.  Personally, I figured out what that “something” was pretty easily but I have no plans to give it away to anyone who hasn’t read the book yet or wouldn’t be able to guess on their own.  Speak is a very engrossing read, Melinda is a painfully real teenager, and above all else, this is a really great book for teens because I think it portrays the way things can happen in high school very well.  I enjoyed it a lot, and best of all, it’s about 200 pages so I was able to read the entire thing in an afternoon!

9 stars.

Read Trish’s review here, Susan’s review here, Muerta’s review here, Jeane’s review here, Stephanie’s review here, and Becky’s review here.