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From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)

Lia, age eighteen, is dying to become a Wintergirl. She and her childhood friend Cassie made a pact to transform their bodies into brittle, icicle-thin figures. In their minds, their ability to starve themselves to perfection would be the envy of all. But now Lia is alone—Cassie’s struggle with bulimia killed her, and Lia did not respond to Cassie’s phone calls on the last night she was alive. Haunted by Cassie’s death, Lia’s anorexia spirals her into a deeper and darker hollow. Surrounding Lia are fractured relationships with her parents, stepmother, and half sister. With raw pain and emotion, Laurie Halse Anderson renders a fierce and unrelenting portrait of a young woman’s struggle with a life-threatening eating disorder. Lia’s relationship with her body and with her family are conveyed with intensity and realism, told through Lia’s blunt, first-person, stream-of-consciousness narrative and emphasized with innovative text formatting. (Age 13 and older)

CCBC Choices 2010 © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2010. Used with permission.

From Horn Book

July 1, 2009
Lia, an anorexic and cutter, hears that her estranged friend Cassie was found dead in a motel room--after leaving Lia thirty-three messages. Cassie's death tips the already fragile Lia into a vortex of self-destruction. Anderson conveys Lia's illness vividly through her dark, fantastic thoughts. This stream-of-consciousness, first-person, present-tense work is tangled and illuminating.

(Copyright 2009 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

From Library Journal

April 20, 2009
Wintergirls opens on the day that Lia, an anorexic, learns that her former best friend Cassie has died of her own eating disorder. Cassie had left 33 increasingly frantic messages on Lia's phone as she was dying. Now Cassie's voice haunts Lia as her disorder takes control, threatening to make her a cold "wintergirl" forever. Why It Is for Us: How do you follow-up a year in which you become a National Book Award finalist (for Chains) and win the Margaret Edwards Award for your lasting contribution to teen literature? If you are Anderson, you publish your most chilling and relevant book since Speak. The force of Lia's will as she starves herself to death is fascinating, frightening, and in every way a wakeup call to adult readers who think they have read the eating-disorder story before.

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

From Horn Book

March 1, 2009
"It's not nice when girls die," observes Lia, who suffers from anorexia and an addiction to cutting herself. Lia has just heard that her estranged friend Cassie was found dead, alone, in a motel room -- this after leaving Lia thirty-three messages, none of which she listened to until it was too late. Cassie's death tips the already fragile Lia into a painful, spooky vortex of self-destruction. The specter of Cassie (who died of a burst esophagus, the result of violent bulimia) haunts her; her busy, divorced parents fail to take adequate action; and even Lia's love for her stepsister can't dispel her disordered visions. Crossed-out words and phrases show the double voices of anorexia vs. healthy reason and illustrate the disconnect between perception and reality. Anderson conveys Lia's illness vividly through her dark, fantastic thoughts -- full of images of tangled, spiky vegetation and continuous, bitter rejection of her parents. To read this stream-of-consciousness, first-person, present-tense work is to be drawn into an anorexic mentality (grotesque descriptions of food, calories assigned to every morsel), and therefore not for every reader, though it makes for a tense, illuminating tale. Why Lia's parents don't intervene is puzzling (familiar as they are with the behaviors and dangers of this mortal disease); but in effect it allows Anderson to demonstrate that Lia's healing must come from her own desire to live.

(Copyright 2009 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

From School Library Journal

Starred review from February 1, 2009
Gr 8 Up-The intensity of emotion and vivid language here are more reminiscent of Anderson's "Speak" (Farrar, 1999) than any of her other works. Lia and Cassie had been best friends since elementary school, and each developed her own style of eating disorder that leads to disaster. Now 18, they are no longer friends. Despite their estrangement, Cassie calls Lia 33 times on the night of her death, and Lia never answers. As events play out, Lia's guilt, her need to be thin, and her fight for acceptance unravel in an almost poetic stream of consciousness in this startlingly crisp and pitch-perfect first-person narrative. The text is rich with words still legible but crossed out, the judicious use of italics, and tiny font-size refrains reflecting her distorted internal logic. All of the usual answers of specialized treatment centers, therapy, and monitoring of weight and food fail to prevail while Lia's cleverness holds sway. What happens to her in the end is much less the point than traveling with her on her agonizing journey of inexplicable pain and her attempt to make some sense of her life."Carol A. Edwards, Denver Public Library"

Copyright 2009 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

From Publisher's Weekly

Starred review from January 26, 2009
Acute anorexia, self-mutilation, dysfunctional families and the death of a childhood friend—returning to psychological minefields akin to those explored in Speak
, Anderson delivers a harrowing story overlaid with a trace of mysticism. The book begins as Lia learns that her estranged best friend, Cassie, has been found dead in a motel room; Lia tells no one that, after six months of silence, Cassie called her 33 times just two days earlier, and that Lia didn’t pick up even once. With Lia as narrator, Anderson shows readers how anorexia comes to dominate the lives of those who suffer from it (here, both Lia and Cassie), even to the point of fueling intense competition between sufferers. The author sets up Lia’s history convincingly and with enviable economy—her driven mother is “Mom Dr. Marrigan,” while her stepmother’s values are summed up with a précis of her stepsister’s agenda: “Third grade is not too young for enrichment, you know.” This sturdy foundation supports riskier elements: subtle references to the myth of Persephone and a crucial plot line involving Cassie’s ghost and its appearances to Lia. As difficult as reading this novel can be, it is more difficult to put down. Ages 12–up.

From Booklist

Starred review from December 15, 2008
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* Problem-novel fodder becomes a devastating portrait of the extremes of self-deception in this brutal and poetic deconstruction of how one girl stealthily vanishes into the depths of anorexia. Lia has been down this road before: her competitive relationship with her best friend, Cassie, once landed them both in the hospital, but now not even Cassies death can eradicate Lias disgust of the fat cows who scrutinize her body all day long. Her father (no, Professor Overbrook) and her mother (no, Dr. Marrigan) are frighteningly easy to dupetinkering and sabotage inflate her scale readings as her weight secretly plunges: 101.30, 97.00, 89.00. Anderson illuminates a dark but utterly realistic world where every piece of food is just a caloric number, inner voices scream NO! with each swallow, and self-worth is too easily gauged: I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through. Struck-through sentences, incessant repetition, and even blank pages make Lias inner turmoil tactile, and gruesome details of her decomposition will test sensitive readers. But this is necessary reading for anyone caught in a feedback loop of weight loss as well as any parent unfamiliar with the scripts teens recite so easily to escape from such deadly situations.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)

From AudioFile Magazine

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