Wintergirls

I don't know if this was a good book or a bad book. I only know that it was raw, and I feel queasy inside.

The glasses vibrate with little screams when I touch them. If I pick them up, they'll shatter. “


For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds. For one breath everything feels better.


She offered herself to the big, bad wolf and didn't scream when he took the first bite.


Why? You want to know why? Step into a tanning booth and fry yourself for two or three days. After your skin bubbles and peels off, roll in coarse salt, then pull on long underwear woven from spun glass and razor wire. Over that goes your regular clothes, as long as they are tight. Smoke gunpowder and go to school to jump through hoops, sit up and beg, and roll over on command. Listen to the whispers that curl into your head at night, calling you ugly and fat and stupid and bitch and whore and worst of all “a disappointment.” Puke and starve and cut and drink because you don't want to feel any of this. Puke and starve and cut and drink because you need an anesthetic and it works. For a while. But then the anesthetic turns into poison and by then it's too late because you are main-lining it now, straight into your soul. It is rotting you and you can't stop. Look in a mirror and find a ghost. Hear every heartbeat scream that everysinglething is wrong with you.
“Why?” is the wrong question. Ask “Why not?”


The crap we put up with when we're awake every day—school, house, house, mall, world—is bad enough. Shouldn't I at least get a break when I'm asleep? Or, if I'm doomed to be haunted by ghosts, shouldn't they only work at night, and dissolve when hit by sunlight?


In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves, and sometimes we do such a good job, we lose track of reality.


If I had lady-spider legs, I would weave a sky where the stars lined up. Mattresses would be tied down tight to their trucks, bodies would never crash through windshields. The moon would rise above the wine-dark sea and give babies only to maidens and musicians who had prayed long and hard. Lost girls wouldn't need compasses or maps. They would find gingerbread paths to lead them out of the forest and home again.


When you're alive, people can hurt you. It's easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out. But it's a lie.


I'm learning how to be angry and sad and lonely and joyful and excited and afraid and happy. I am learning how to taste everything.


The tiny elf dancer became a wooden doll whose strings were jerked by people not paying attention.

Interesting read. I liked Speak better.

I really really really did not like most of this book. I found the main character, Lia, unlikeable at best and overly selfish at worst, but as the book wore on I think I could understand her better. (It does seem kind of insensitive that I didn't like her but eh) I feel like this is a book that certain people should be very careful about and others shouldn't even read, because despite its bringing to light a very important issue, it does so I a way that is what I assume would be problematic ally triggering for someone going through that same issue. 

Dnf at 13%

Lia + Cassie, bestfriends linked by their paired eating disorders until Cassie decided to get better by cutting Lia out and Lia cycled out of her most recent inpatient program. Then Cassie dies and her ghost haunts Lia through her final spiral into anorexia.

I've got a thing for eating disorder stories, this one did some interesting things with the text and felt pretty true to some of the memoirs I've read. It really sucked me in right through to the end (not sure I was totally convinced by it but, so it goes.)

This book really opened my eyes to eating disorders and the mental anguish that one faces with these disorders. Really intense read.

I couldn't connect with the characters and I really didn't like the writing style, I'm just not a fan of stream of consciousness writing. I did get used to it after a while though and that made the book easier to read. That being said, I don't know how I feel about the book. It's about a serious issue and is very chilling at times. However, I don't ever connect with these kinds of psychological books nor do I really enjoy them. I think it's time to stop reading them.

Very hard to read, but better than I thought it would be. Loved the different dynamics between Lia and all her family members. Also the Elijah thing.

GRRRR!!! I wrote a review and it disappeared. HERE IS TAKE TWO!


WHAT A MIND TRIP THIS BOOK WAS! I give this book a 4 star rating because it was written well but not how it made me feel.

We venture into the life of Lia Overbrook, an 18 year old who has a love/hate relationship with food. Lia and her best friend Cassie at the age of nine or so make a pact that they will be the skinniest girls ever, for always, together. Cassie chooses the “let me eat anything and everything I want then head over to the bathroom or anywhere, stick my finger in my mouth and throw it all up” route while Lia chooses the “I will only eat 500 to 800 calories a day and the less the better” route. At some point Lia and Cassie end their friendship and at the age of 19, Cassie is found dead in a motel room after calling Lia 33 times. This is where the story picks up... Lia finds out that Cassie is dead and starts to feel guilty for not picking up any of the 33 calls. Lia has already been admitted twice because of her eating disorder. Instead of vowing never to return because she will be healthier, Lia vows to never get caught which in turn is a vow never to return. BTW, Lia is not only anorexic but a cutter as well. Lia spirals out of control and we as readers take the ride with her.

Again, I gave this book four stars because it is written very well. It left me feeling all sorts of wrong and I cannot begin to count the many times I wanted to stop reading this book and chuck it out of my kindle. If it weren't for this 50 states challenge I WANT/NEED to finish or the fact that I have this thing about finishing all the books I start I definitely would have.

I honestly don't know if I would recommend this book to my nieces or my son for that matter. I know that the author must have wanted to bring awareness to this disease, to this addiction. I just can't bring myself to trust that some of the girls I know will walk away with the positive of this book because I myself felt slimy, gross, ugly while reading this book. Lia has a lot of self hate going on but hate for how others look as well. I am all about loving yourself no matter what weight. If you are overweight and don't want to be, the answer is not berate yourself until you get skinny. The answer is to love yourself enough to push yourself to lose the weight and still love yourself at whatever weight you are at. The way society is nowadays this message is lost even in the best of homes, lost among the best support systems you have in place. Doctors are already targeting children and their weight. Their recommendations are not tact. Kids walk out of the office thinking they are fat and they have to do something about it. This book could give them the means to think they can do something about it. Kids never think this stuff can happen to them. They don't think things could spiral out of control for them. Lia didn't love herself at all. Lia didn't want to get well. Lia felt she was doing what was best for her. Lia got away with a lot of things. Lia was uber smart and Lia was uber reckless. Would kids that were already down this road take away with them the message this book is trying to convey?

This book was intense, makes you feel very real feelings and is extremely scary. If you have your child, pre-teen, teen read this book I would suggest to read it with them and then discuss it with them. Use it as a means to spark a discussion on this. Please please please tell them every day how beautiful and wonderful they are already.

Let me tell you right off the bat that this review will have spoilers. I plan on quoting the heck out of this book.

Laurie Halse Anderson is amazing. I really wish I could be her friend because she writes books that make me think and cry and hurt and feel. She did it in Speak and again here in Wintergirls.

Lia is anorexic. She is so far beyond unhealthy that she is at one point described as ‘a ghost with a heartbeat'. After two stints in a rehab facility that she dubs ‘prison' she is living with her father, step-mother and half-sister because she just cannot cope living with her cold, heart surgeon, no nonsense mother.

Lia takes us through memories of meeting her best friend Cassie for the first time, their first fight and the first time she saw Cassie force herself to throw up. Cassie tells her she just wants to be thin, she just wants to be perfect and so together their journey begins, but after a fallout in which they don't speak for three months Cassie dies alone in a motel room.

Before she dies Cassie calls Lia 30+ times, but Lia never answers. When she discovers Cassie is dead her guilt is crippling and shameful. She begins to see Cassie's ghost everywhere. Desperate to get to her ideal perfect weight she steps closer and closer to death's door.

Anderson's writing is brilliant. Simply stunning at times. Lia is not a sympathetic character. She has turned against the people who love her, with the exception of her sister, lashing out at them for trying to help her get healthy. But her anger and her desperation is real. It is so honest and raw and full of hurt.

She writes the story as if it is Lia's journal. At times she will have crossed something out as if she is at war in her head over the things she knows are good and the way she feels she must think. I found that to be such a perfect way of representing the conflict in Lia.

I'll leave you with a couple of quotes from the book. Just a taste, because really, you need to read this book yourself!

“They tied me back together, but they didn't use double knots. My insides are draining out of the fault lines in my skin, I can feel it, but every time I check the bandages, they're dry.”


“There's no point in asking why, even though everybody will. I know why. The harder question is ‘why not?'. I can't believe she ran out of answers before I did.”
http://knowitnotsomuch.blogspot.com/2011/02/wintergirls.html

Wow. Intense. Good. I'm glad I have a Princess Diaries book to read next because this did a really good job of putting me in a sad, anorexic, crazy girl's mindset. Not a light read, but it did keep me engaged... wondering whether or not Lia was going to survive the book.

Wintergirls had a message and a story to tell about a small life lesson of strength. While Lia is struggling to find her way into the black abyss of nothingness, she relives multiple points in her life that make the transition that much harder. I would like to say that I knew how this story was going to end, how it was going to show the character's true nature, but really what reader can ever actually say that, even after reading the short description of what the book is supposed to be about? Anderson will make you see the hidden aspects in our everyday lives that we ignore, push into the back of our brains till they become dangerously close to physical beings. You will never, ever get more psychotically-challenged till you read a story that you secretly know is currently happening out there in the world, but you just can't face it yet. Read Wintergirls, listen to, hear, taste, feel and most of all see the story of a girl that painfully learns the smallest things in life are worthwhile, while the other difficult parts can be dealt with. No matter how much you think they can't.
Lia's impending, powerful emotions will feel like you're riding a roller coaster and you never want to get off till you ride it all the way through. Anderson will take you through a wonderfully realistic journey of watching the loss of a friend effect your everyday life, while life continues to struggle through, whether you like it or not. The story of this girl will spread and be heard, and hopefully, be learned.
Recommended to everyone, and I do mean every living being on this earth that can get this book somehow into their pudgy hands.

Creepy & depressing. The “happy ending” is too late & too brief.

I'll try to write a summary after I write my review:

Wow..I love this book. Its..haunting and chilling and amazing. Parts of it gaze me goose bumps, just the word “Wintergirls” is freaky. The writing is dazzling, especially the “literary devices”. Cassie, Lia's old friend, reminded me so much of one of my friends it was scary. Not the skinny part, but the personality part. I love the little crossed out parts, they made me laugh.


SUMMARY

Lia is a girl headed straight toward Wintergirl-life. She eats barely anything, and excerises for hours at night to get rid of her food. She's already been admitted to a center, twice and is now living with her father, her step-mom(Jennifer), and her step-sister(Emma). In order to fool Jennifer when she steps on the scale, she sews quarters into the pockets of her robe.
But starving herself isn't her only problem, to “let the pain go” Lia makes little cuts on her hips and legs.
Then her old best friend, Cassie, dies alone in a motel room.
And it only gets worse when Lia discovers that Cassie called her thirty-three times.
Then, she starts seeing and hearing Cassie's ghost. Talking to her. Telling her how she can't wait for Lia to become one of her, a Wintergirl. And doing crossword puzzles in her shrink's office.
To add to that, her mother Dr.Marrigan is trying to get Lia admitted again, which sparks a few quarrels with Lia and her father.
Adding even more to that, Lia finds out that Cassie's last message to her was “You won”, referring to the bet that Lia would be skinnier than Cassie.
But back to the fighting thing.
After Lia and her dad have this one fight, Lia decides to cut herself. Really cut herself. She's half-dead when her third-grade sister finds her. Needless to say, Lia is sent to live with her mom and is going to be reviewed for psycho-ness(after she told her therapist about seeing Cassie and everything else).
However, Lia doesn't want this. So she spends 10 days in a motel room, once again becoming very,very, very close to death and Forever Wintergirl Land. What saves her, is talking to Cassie and seeing what her life could be like, if she gets better.
It ends with Lia deciding she wants to get better and knowing how long it would take her.