Book review: "Wintergirls" by Laurie Halse Andersen

My first book review!! I wanted to start off with something a bit different than my usual reading selections. I decided on the book "Wintergirls", written by Laurie Halse Andersen.

Wintergirls is a story about an 18-year-old high school senior girl named Lia, and her friend Cassie. They´ve been friends since elementary school but, in the last year, haven´t spoken to each other. Both Lia and Cassie developed eating disorders--Lia is anorexic and Cassie bulimic--and due to the tensions that developed, Cassie broke off her firendship with Lia. Despite their estrangement, Cassie calls Lia 33 times on the night of her death, and Lia never answers. Throughout the book, Lia's guilt, her need to be thin, and her fight for acceptance call out to us readers in an amazingly touching (and even heart-rending) first-person narrative.

She´s smart, she hides things: no-one suspects that she´s fallen back into the "bad habits" that sent her to the hospital in the first place. Throughout the book, there are words that are crossed out, fonts that are bigger or smaller, repetitive chants that she tells herself, even blank pages that really make you know what she´s thinking, doing, going through: conflicting emotions, hating herself, hating her body, wanting to shout out for people to listen but stopping herself and keeping the distance that she needs to keep up her charade that everything is alright.

This book has really called out to me. The topic of anorexia and bulimia is close to my heart, as I suffered eating disorders as a teen, caused by something nearing a social phobia. I saw a classmate of mine trying to hide this very same condition from everybody around her.

Lia´s a main character that you can easily relate to, even if you haven´t lived an eating disorder. Her inner conflict, the things she wants and says she doesn´t....we can all relate to that.Who hasn´t been a teenager? Though the anorexia is a part of Lia´s story and problems, it doesn´t stop there...it´s also a story about her relationships with everyone around her, and how she has to learn to accept herself as she is and stop trying to be what all of the people around her expect her to.

The most tense and gritty moments for me were those in which you see Lia´s internal battle with wanting food and convincing herself she can't have it, that anything more than 500 calories a day is bad bad bad. How she tries and tries to reach "goal weights" that are lower and lower numbers, admitting that shéll never be satisfied. My heart clenched when she makes herself sick eating a cupcake once when she "loses control" because her body is too "used to broth" and anything other than the small amount of low-calorie and low-amount food that she permits herself, and accepts that as "punishment".

It´s a very had-to-read book. Not in the sense of the language used (which is actually very evocative and even poetic sometimes) but in the sense that there are a great deal of truly harsh situations throughout the book, and some people might find the stream of thoughts of an anorexic a bit difficult to face and absorb. It really drums in that anorexia is a mental disorder that affects eating habits. It´s definitely not a "frivolous read".

That said, I´d absolutely recommend this book.