Wintergirls
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4.6 • 7 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Wintergirls is a powerful but intimate story of one girl's chilling descent into the all-consuming vortex of anorexia.
Lia and Cassie were best friends. But something went wrong and Cassie changed. Now Cassie is dead and Lia has thirty-three unanswered calls on her phone, thirty-three messages from her ex-best friend, all sent the day she died.
How did she die? Why did she cut herself off?
While Lia searches for answers, she drives herself relentlessly on her own path to destruction: to be thin, strong, in control. And completely empty.
Laurie Halse Anderson is the author of several books for young adults, including the New York Times bestselling novel Speak. She is the recipient of the prestigious ALAN Award (2008), which honours those who have made outstanding contributions to the field of adolescent literature. Laurie Halse Anderson lives in northern New York State with her husband.
textpublishing.com.au
'Beautiful, heartbreaking and hopeful. Lia's voice is exquisite.' Melina Marchetta
'A devastating portrait of the extremes of self-deception...Laurie Halse Anderson illuminates a dark but utterly realistic world.' Booklist
'Tragic, brutal and true. I wanted to hug Lia, and then shake her, and then hug her again. This is a story that's so hard to tell well. Laurie Halse Anderson has nailed it.' Alyssa Brugman
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Acute anorexia, self-mutilation, dysfunctional families and the death of a childhood friend returning to psychological minefields akin to those explored in Speak, Anderson delivers a harrowing story overlaid with a trace of mysticism. The book begins as Lia learns that her estranged best friend, Cassie, has been found dead in a motel room; Lia tells no one that, after six months of silence, Cassie called her 33 times just two days earlier, and that Lia didn't pick up even once. With Lia as narrator, Anderson shows readers how anorexia comes to dominate the lives of those who suffer from it (here, both Lia and Cassie), even to the point of fueling intense competition between sufferers. The author sets up Lia's history convincingly and with enviable economy her driven mother is "Mom Dr. Marrigan," while her stepmother's values are summed up with a pr cis of her stepsister's agenda: "Third grade is not too young for enrichment, you know." This sturdy foundation supports riskier elements: subtle references to the myth of Persephone and a crucial plot line involving Cassie's ghost and its appearances to Lia. As difficult as reading this novel can be, it is more difficult to put down. Ages 12 up.
