Wintergirls Book Review

Book Name: Wintergirls
Author/s: Laurie Halse Anderson
Language English
Original Title: Wintergirls
Publisher, year: Speak, 2010
Page total: 278
Date Read: June 26-27
Genre/s: YA, realistic fiction
First line of Book:"So she tells me, the words dribbling out with the cranberry muffin crumbs, commas dunked in her coffee."
Review:
" I took the knife out of my pocket and cut my palm, just a little. 'I swear to be the skinniest girl in school, skinnier than you.'
Cassie's eyes got big as the blood pooled in my hand. She grabbed the knife and slashed her palm. 'I bet I'll be skinnier than you.'
'No, don't make it a bet. Let's be skinniest together'.
'Okay, but I'll be skinnier.'"

'Lia and Cassie are best friends, wintergirls frozen in matchstick bodies, competitors in a deadly contest to see who can be the skinniest. But what comes after size zero and size double-zero? When Cassie succumbs to the demons within, Lia feels she is being haunted by her friend’s restless spirit.

In her most emotionally wrenching, lyrically written book since the multiple-award-winning Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson explores Lia’s descent into the powerful vortex of anorexia, and her painful path toward recovery.' - from Goodreads

I loved this book. It's dark, true and goes straight to the heart of the matter. LHA has that gift, not only with WINTERGIRLS but also with SPEAK. It is written in a very lyrical way and sometimes I found myself re-reading some parts and writing down the pages where they were, because it was just so beautiful and raw.

The way Lia thinks and sees the world is also very originally represented: with striked text to show what she doesn't allow herself to think, different fonts and sizes, sentences in italic where she has a flashback and numbers between parenthesis that represent the calories of whatever she put into her mouth.

Overall, this is a book I'll most definitely re-read and I feel that everyone should read this at least once in their lifetimes.

here's the book trailer:


LHA talks about WINTERGIRLS:

Rating: 5/5 kisses


Quotes from book:
"What do I want?
The answer to that question does not exist."

"Do I want to die from the inside out or the outside in?"

"I failed eating, failed drinking, failed not cutting myself into shreds. Failed friendship. Failed sisterhood and daughterhood. Failed mirrors and scales and phone calls. Good thing I'm stable. "

"I lift my arm out of the water. It's a log. Put it back under and it blows up even bigger. People see the log and call it a twig. They yell at me because I can't see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop. "

"I wish I had cancer. I will burn in hell for that, but it's true. "

"You’re not dead, but you’re not alive, either. You’re a wintergirl, Lia-Lia, caught in between the worlds. You’re a ghost with a beating heart. Soon you’ll cross the border and be with me. I’m so stoked. I miss you wicked.

“Dead girl walking,” the boys say in the halls.
“Tell us your secret,” the girls whisper, one toilet to another.
I am that girl.
I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through.
I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame. "