Viking Juvenile, 2009
ISBN: 067001110X
Available: New and Used
Cassie was Lia’s best friend. Her body was found in a hotel room, alone. The two girls hadn’t spoken in months, so Lia didn’t answer her cell when Cassie called on the night she died… thirty three times. It’s one more guilty secret in a friendship built on secrets and insecurities. Cassie and Lia weren’t just close friends- they were companions and competitors who supported and hid their eating disorders from the world, wintergirls in the borderlands between life and death, reality and delusion. Cassie may be dead, but she’s not gone- she is haunting Lia, seductively and ominously pulling at Lia to join her..
Wintergirls is an intense and horrifying portrait of self-destruction, delusion, and guilt. Lia is so lost in the unreal mental patterns of her anorexia that it’s hard to tell if she’s truly haunted or if Casssie’s ghost is merely a delusion, and Cassie’s ghost is not nearly as frightening as Lia’s starvation, cutting, and altered perceptions. In the end, Lia’s self-abuse and inability to judge the power she has to haunt others makes her a terrifying living ghost, much more than Cassie, dead and buried, can ever be.
Laurie Halse Anderson did extensive research into eating disorders for this book, but Wintergirls doesn’t come across as an earnest “message book”. Rather, she has created a powerful individual portrait of a teenage girl who is journeying into hell,, one with which many teens will identify. Highly recommended for all YA collections.
Contains: cutting, drug use, suicide, some language.
Review by Kirsten Kowalewski
We have a second look review of Wintergirls by Michele Lee:
Many times in Wintergirls, the main character mentions feeling like a puppet whose strings are being pulled, which in turn is a fitting description for the feel of this book. Wintergirls is the story of Lia, who suffers from anorexia, depression, and a family who sees her as nothing but a burden. Her best friend Cassie suffered too, until she died alone in a hotel room. That’s where the book starts, and reading through Lia’s breakdown is like a series of progressively numbing slaps. Anderson weaves the strings of this story together into something fierce, beautiful and so terrible it hurts to read.
I highly recommend it, despite triggering potential, because this kind of spotlight being shed on problems is something we desperately need as a society. Furthermore, as libraries are all too often the only safe place children and teens in need have to go to try to learn more about themselves, books like Wintergirls is an essential to public collections.
Contains: extreme anorexia, depression, language, cutting, drug use