"Wintergirls" book review

Books about eating disorders must straddle a very fine line, exposing the diseases as real and being as truthful as possible without making them look the least bit enticing.
In her new novel for young adults, “Wintergirls,” Laurie Halse Anderson uses her gift for becoming the character so well that it seems like a journal of a real-life girl — a girl who is killing herself slowly for the sake of being thin.
“I would never be popular. I didn’t want to be; I liked being shy. I’d never be the smartest or the hottest or the happiest. By eighth grade, you start to figure out your limits. But there was one thing I was really good at … I [would be] the skinniest girl in school.”
With that, best friends Lia and Cassie prick their fingers under the moonlight to seal their oath in blood, and their journey toward death begins.
Just as in Anderson’s best-selling young-adult novel “Speak,” painful life events lead to self-destructive behavior that seems out of the characters’ power to control.
Lia’s dysfunctional family and the death of her bulimic best friend cause her to gravitate to the only thing she feels she can control in life: her weight.
The reader may want to scream at Lia and shake her, but may also feel the demons and visions she sees are the same ones the reader sometimes sees.
Lia knows she is dying and dreams about it. She doesn’t want to die, but she can’t stop it. All she can do is calculate calories of the food she does eat. Self-condemnation is all she knows.
“I know exactly what’s wrong. I am a gluttonous, gorging failure. A waste.”
This is not a happy book. It is dark, from the cold winter setting to the demons that Lia sees every day. Lia struggles with the ghost of Cassie, who she believes wants her dead. Cassie’s ghost tells her she is trapped between the living and the dead, and she wants Lia on her team.
“The dead do walk and haunt and crawl into your bed at night. Ghosts sneak into your head when you’re not looking ... poison berries make girls stronger, but sometimes kill them. If you howl at the moon and swear on your blood, anything you desire will be yours. Be careful what you wish for. There’s always a catch.”
At the end of “Speak” the silenced rape victim compares herself to a tree. When she speaks, she can finally grow. “I feel the frozen stillness melt down through the inside of me, dripping shards of ice that vanish in a puddle of sunlight on the stained floor. Words float up.”
In the same way, “Wintergirls” does not have a happy ending but ends with the promise of a new beginning.
“Somehow, I dragged myself out of the dark and asked for help … there is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn’t matter anymore. I am thawing.”
Anderson will again capture, move and, more importantly, cause her teen audience to stop and think. Only books written with her clarity and honesty can shoulder the weight of stirring a life — and perhaps even saving one.