Laurie Halse Anderson’s latest novel for young adults, Wintergirls, due out in March 2009, is the haunting, gut-wrenching story of 18 year old Lia who is losing her battle with the demons of anorexia. Her estranged best friend Cassie has died suddenly, and Lia is lost in a world of her own making as she is failing to cope with her family life, school, and Cassie’s death. Lia’s relationships with everyone around her – mother, father, stepmother, sister, therapist, guy she meets at hotel where Cassie died – take the back seat to the ghosts that plague her. Their appeals to her to eat, to save herself, fall on ears that can only hear those taunting inner voices that tell her that anything above 0 pounds is too fat and that she will never be enough.
Lia’s pain, anger and fear captured me from the first word. As I watched her spiral out of control and heard the ghosts whisper in her ears, I felt like Lia does during one of her nightmares: “Spiders hatch and crawl out of my belly button, hairy little tar beads with ballerina feet. They swarm, spinning a silk veil, one hundred thousand spider thought woven together until they wrap me up in a cozy shroud.” Anderson’s imagery, language and tone are spot on perfect throughout the book. Lia and the reader hover on the edge of an abyss, mesmerized, sinking ever deeper into a frozen pool of self-loathing, deception and misery. Again and again I was reminded of how tortured I felt as I read Speak, and that same sense of hopeless anguish shrouds Lia and the reader throughout this excellent and unbelievably powerful novel.
- Posted by Cori