Letting Ana Go

April 29, 2013
This harrowing cautionary tale (in the vein of 2012’s Lucy in the Sky) demonstrates the inability of family and friends to rescue a loved one from the disease that has become her “best friend,” as an athletic high school sophomore with a healthy attitude toward food is gradually overtaken by anorexia. Ana narrates in diary form (ironically begun as a food journal assigned by the track coach to ensure adequate caloric intake), and each entry begins with her current weight. Her parents’ breakup, which Ana attributes to her mother’s inability to maintain her figure, becomes a catalyst for her determination to “take control.” Encouraged by her friend Jill’s desire for dieting company and Jill’s picture-perfect but almost diabolical mother, who buys them clothing in too-small sizes and says things like, “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels,” Ana records her increasingly distorted perceptions about her body, friends, parents, and self-worth. This story provides disturbing insight into the online world of “thinspiration” (anorexics encouraging each other), the limited health care resources available to treat this illness, and the mortal risk of those afflicted. Ages 14–up.

July 1, 2013

Gr 8 Up-Fans of Go Ask Alice (Prentice-Hall, 1971) and Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls (Viking, 2009) will gravitate to this compelling account of one girl's battle with anorexia. Asked to maintain a food diary as a part of her cross-country training, the unnamed narrator begins her story as a healthy, well-adjusted teen from a privileged family. Her overweight mother struggles with food issues on a daily basis and receives little emotional support from her husband, who either humiliates or ignores her. Witnessing the deterioration of her parents' marriage, the teen becomes overwhelmed by a flood of conflicting emotions and channels her need for order into restricting what she eats. Through her journal entries, readers witness her gradual descent from self-discipline to denial as she convinces herself that she grows emotionally stronger as she eats less. Readers will relate to the teen's experiences navigating family dynamics, friendship, and relationships, and the first-person narrative lends realism to her character as it allows access to the reasoning behind her misguided decisions. As real as she appears, however, the prose seems too polished and situations feel staged for dramatic effect. Those seeking an authentic story may be better served reading a harrowing memoir such as Marya Hornbacher's Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (HarperCollins, 1998).-Audrey Sumser, Cuyahoga County Public Library, Mayfield, OH

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2013
Anyone familiar with the sensationalist pseudo-diary Go Ask Alice knows it won't end well for an anonymous (fictitious) teen who chronicles her eating disorder. The journal begins as a food diary assigned by the unnamed narrator's running coach. When the narrator goes on vacation with her friend Jill, Jill's dreamy brother, Jack, and Jill's perfectly put-together mother, Susan, Jill convinces her to restrict her eating. As in Alice, the cautionary tale thrills readers with lurid details of the unnamed diarist's spiral into danger. The diarist's weight, food intake and exercise regimen are recorded in detail, with frequent mentions of dress sizes and tips such as the "Thin Commandments." Every pressure the narrator experiences seems to be food-related, sometimes to an absurdly exaggerated degree ("Jack couldn't take his eyes off you [last night]," Susan warns the narrator after catching her with a doughnut hole. "I just wouldn't want you to start forming bad habits that would get in the way of that"). Readers who struggle with body image or with their own eating will surely have their own anxieties provoked by the obsessive details and the narrator's unresolved disgust with her own and others' bodies. A disturbing tale that feels meant to titillate rather than caution. (Fiction. 12-18)

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July 1, 2013
Grades 8-12 Written, organized, designed, and titled in the style of Go Ask Alice (1971), this is the predictably bleak tale of an unnamed 16-year-old girl whose interest in losing a few pounds becomes a five-alarm fire of anorexia. The clipped, first-person diary narrative is as much of its time as Alice was in its own, complete with such modern devices as a calorie-counting app that the diarist and her best friend use to monitor their weight loss. If you've read books like this beforeand you probably haveyou know the drill: mindful eating leading to pleasing early results, mistaking people's concern for jealousy, unsettling details (using red marker to circle the fat areas of her body), misplaced pride at her discipline ( thinspiration ), breakdown, rehab, and relapse. Parents and coaches receive a good deal of blame for praising the cosmetic benefits of weight loss, heedless of the consequences, which makes this an interesting option for adult readers, too. The anonymous authorship allows for the kind of scared-straight ending rarely seen todaybut familiar, of course, to those still scarred by Alice.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)