Lia and Cassie are (were) best friends.
Lia and Cassie were not the smartest/ prettiest/ best girls in their class, but they were the thinnest.
And now Cassie is dead.
Wintergirls is a story of a broken girl, in a broken family who has a very broken relationship with food. While Lia has been in and out of treatment for her issues with food, she still struggles with food. Things for Lia will not go back to "before" when her parents lived together, when she was a "real girl".
It is hard to talk about Wintergirls without trivializing the story. What could just be another book about anorexia ends up being a lyrical internal struggle one girl has. Laurie Halse Anderson writes the story in a way that you feel as conflicted as Lia: Should she have called Cassie? Should she drink the hot cocoa? Should she listen to her mom? Should she keep going to the next goal on the scale?
While this is not one of those "nice" stories, I think that most readers will agree it is a powerful story about ghosts that we hold onto, and how those ghosts might be more powerful that what is real.
I'll see you @ the Library!
Katie (who is going to read a happy book after she finishes The Patron Saint of Butterflies by Cecilia Gallante)