Review: Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

Wintergirls
By Laurie Halse Anderson

Wintergirls is one of those touchy books you may read in the circle of the YA Readings. It develops around Lia. Who, once, had a best friend named Cassie, and they both have eating disorders. They made this pact/challenge of who of them would be the skinniest girl in the city –or even the world-. Then they would be glorified and they would feel like they have accomplished the goal of their lives. But then, it’s nothing out of normal, they are just teenagers, right?

And then they became a bulimic with an anorexic.

Two bodies in pure bones.

Two girls completely at the lost.

A toxic relationship.

At the beginning of the book Lia gets really bad news that sets her on a spiral down during the whole book. Through it she shows us how an anorexic girl can survive and deceived her fathers, especially when she has been on treatment several times. She will eat a certain portion of calories a day, and sometime she would puke them out, or just exhaust herself with exercises –even when her body doesn’t even respond to her commands-. That’s what they do to be a perfect girl.

But what it’s a perfect girl?

So I want to point it out the good thing the book has, and I think the most important it is: It’s real, people!

Many of the things that happen in the book, in Lia’s live are just normal thing that this Wintergirls go through.

The websites, the post, the advices, the talks and the diets.

Each and every one of them is real. Ana’s or Anorexics have an extreme diet than sometimes they just can eat up to 200 calories a day; when the normal diet of a person it’s between 1,500 and 2,000 calories per day. The suffering, the anxiety, the depressions and any co morbid mental issue than exist can easily exist in a person with an eating disorder. Lia is a teenager whose parents’ status has made a change in her. She goes through a hundred of stages, and makes a lot of people miserable in order to reach her goals, one at a time. She tricks them into believe she is good, healing, adjusting… She can’t understand how a normal person thinks, she can’t even understand why she isn’t the way she wants.

Now, the crosswords were a little overpowering, but I could understand the teenager factor in it. I like that the chapter’s numbers were related to the story. And of course, I didn’t like Lia. Oddly, it’s the first book where I didn’t like anything, anything about the lead role. But I know why.

I’m not an Ana.

I don’t live her life.

I don’t want to live that life.

I can’t comprehend why she is always so selfish, with her parents, stepmother, her step sister, the guy she meets, Cassie…

But after reading the book, I did a little bit of research and I was stunned. The world isn’t perfect. Not everybody is happy with their own being. Not everybody wants to be better, meaning being normal.

There are people out there suffering in silence, because they want to suffer, and a lot of them being happy while killing themselves, starving themselves.

1 of every 5 deaths of anorexia are for suicide. And the anorexia has the highest rate of death in mental illness, surpassing even the Schizophrenia. And the coo morbid most common on the persons with eating-disorders it’s the depression.

This book is annoying, but it makes us conscious about things than once, when I started reading this book a year ago couldn’t understand. But now I do, and I’m glad someone had the balls to write something so explicit and real about a disorder like this.

So, finally, that’s why my rating its high. 

Have you read Wintergirls? If so, what did you think? If not, what are you waiting for?!