Reading Rants! Out of the Ordinary Teen Booklists!

“We held hands when we walked down the gingerbread path into the forest, blood dripping from our fingers. We danced with witches and kissed monsters. We turned us into wintergirls and when she tried to leave, I pulled her back into the snow because I was afraid to be alone.” Lia and Cassie have been best friends since they were little girls. They did everything together: sleepovers, ski trips, and, as they got older, starvation. Egging each other on in a deadly competition to be the thinnest, Lia developed anorexia, while Cassie became the bulimic. Now Cassie is dead, and Lia is left to fight her silent desperate battle with food alone. Haunted by Cassie’s ghost and the painful memories of two stints in rehab that didn’t take, Lia can’t seem to muster the strength to either kick her disease once and for all or join Cassie in what sometimes feels like the blissfulness of death. Instead, she drifts through her perpetually hungry existence a wintergirl, “a ghost with a beating heart,” not quite alive and not yet dead. She has gotten so good at manipulating her divorced parents and her shrink that no one knows just how close to the edge she really is. Deep down inside, Lia wants to hang on. If she could just find something to hang on to. Using lyrical language and a touch of dark fairy dust, award-winning author Laurie Halse Anderson shines a powerful light on the secret world of eating disorders. Her characterization of Lia is morbidly compelling, and once Anderson has you in the icy grip of her persuasive prose there is no breaking her hold until you discover what Lia’s fate will be. Brutally honest and incredibly well-crafted.

Donnie’s older sister Karen has always been the person he turns to when he gets upset about their parents’ constant fighting. But now Karen is the one who needs help – the family has discovered that she has anorexia and everyone will need to work together to make sure she gets better. Except Donnie’s parents can’t stop playing the blame game when it comes to Karen, and Donnie begins to feel invisible at both school and home in the wake of Karen’s illness. He feels guilty for feeling relieved when she’s in the hospital and he actually gets some attention from their parents: “Without her to absorb all the energy, there’s some left for me.” When the worst happens, Donnie will have figure out who he is if he’s not the family peacemaker, not the invisible son, not Karen’s nerdy little brother. This first novel is a riveting look at how anorexia affects not only individuals, but their families and friends as well. Donnie is hauntingly real and his pain is palpable. Keep some Kleenex handy.

This book had a tremendous impact on me as a teen and I’m thrilled to see it back in print. The author went through anorexia herself and a lot of this story is autobiographical, which makes it all the more powerful. Leslie Hiller is a privileged, white, uptown girl. Her parents live to please her, especially her mother. But sometimes she feels that her mother cares too much, and finds that attention smothering. When she can’t control her mother’s feelings for her, she decides to control her weight.The scene from this book that has always stuck with me is when Leslie’s mother takes a plate of pork chops to her room and begs her to eat them. Leslie swears she will as soon as her mother leaves the room. In the shadow of her mother’s anguish, she calmly walks over to the window and scrapes the food off the plate to the ground outside. Tough stuff that was ahead of its time and almost too painful to read. So, of course, you MUST read it.

Finally! They said it couldn’t be done–but Lori Gottlieb has done it. She has written a memoir about anorexia that is FUNNY! Not to trivialize the seriousness of this disease, but Gottlieb’s descriptions of her shallow Beverly Hills family in high 70′s camp style is really hilarious. The downside to all that humor is the sad fact that Gottlieb became anorexic when she was ONLY ELEVEN. That’s way too young for anyone to feel fat. If you want to read a really DIFFERENT book about anorexia, check out Stick Figure.

15 year old Sarah is thrilled when she gets the perfect summer job — as a mother’s helper in New York City! She’s looking forward to fun and sun in the Big Apple, until she finds out that Emily, the young teen she’s in charge of, has an eating disorder. Sarah begins to feel like she may be in over her head as she tries to deal with Emily’s strange eating rituals, Emily’s crazy divorced parents, Florence and Elliot, and her own blossoming romance with Angel, a mysterious boy who lives in Emily’s building. One thing’s for sure — things are going to get worse for Sarah and Emily before they get better, but you can count on a happy ending with this somewhat lighter take on eating disorders. If you find yourself bonding with Sarah, read about her further adventures in Will You Be My Brussel Sprout?

Nell’s problem is that she’s ahead of her time. A wanna-be feminist in 1899, Nell doesn’t get much sympathy from her traditional family when she tries to turn down her cousin’s marriage proposal in favor of attending college. To distract herself from the impending doom of matrimony to a man she doesn’t love, Nell immerses herself in the making of a crazy quilt. As Nell’s obsession with quilt grows, her body shrinks as she refuses both food and support from her concerned relatives. As the end of the book draws nearer, you’re not sure what will be finished first, the quilt or Nell’s life. An interesting historical novel that portrays anorexia in a way that has nothing to do with modern society and bikini-clad babes in Seventeen magazine.

What if, all the sudden, for no apparent reason, you just started gaining weight, tons of it. We’re not talking just five or ten pounds here — more like fifty, a hundred pounds of extra weight that just show up one day even though you weren’t eating anything. That’s the nightmare that is happening to Lara. Lara’s a girl who has it all — a great bod, a gorgeous boyfriend and the perfect family. But that all starts to change when Lara starts to tip the scales in the wrong direction. Suddenly, Lara is getting fatter and fatter and nobody knows why. The doctors are puzzled; her parents are disappointed that their prom queen daughter doesn’t have the “discipline” to slim down. The extra poundage that Lara is packing on is giving her a different perception of her once perfect life. Lara begins to transform in her cocoon of blubber into a new person. She’s just not sure if the new Lara is better than the old. “Weigh” Lara’s life for yourself and decide if putting on the pounds has made her better or just bitter.