"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.
Lia and Cassie were best friends, wintergirls frozen in matchstick bodies. But now Cassie is dead. Lia's mother is busy saving other people's lives. Her father is away on business. Her stepmother is clueless. And the voice inside Lia's head keeps telling her to remain in control, stay strong, lose more, weigh less. If she keeps on going this way - thin, thinner, thinnest - maybe she'll disappear altogether.
In her most emotionally wrenching, lyrically written book since the National Book Award finalist Speak, best-selling author Laurie Halse Anderson explores one girl's chilling descent into the all-consuming vortex of anorexia.
Narrator Jeannie Stith delivers this story's introductory scenes with brutal harshness as Lia learns that her best friend, Cassie, has been discovered dead in a hotel room. The two best friends had been competitors in anorexia. Stith's staccato delivery is fitting for the embattled Lia, who hides her self-starvation and cutting from the perplexed adults who want to save her. Stith whispers Lia's compulsive calorie counting and uses a muffled voice to deliver the haunting speeches that Lia believes are coming from Cassie's restless spirit. In her text Anderson uses italics, parentheses, and cross-outs to create visual representations of Lia's torment; in the narration the tones used to differentiate these are somewhat distracting. Still, Stith takes listeners deep into Lia's dark and frightening fight for survival. S.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Laurie Halse Anderson is the author of the multiple-award-winning novel Speak, widely considered to be one of the most important books for young adults published in recent years, as well as Catalyst, Prom, and Twisted. In 2008, Ms. Anderson received the ALAN Award for outstanding contributions to the field of adolescent literature. She lives in northern New York State with her husband.
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