Clare B. DunkleReseñas

An eye opening memoir detailing the intense struggle with an eating disorder that is sure to speak to and educate you.

TW: Anorexia, purging, self-harm, loss of pregnancy, suicide, death

Elena Dunkle aided by her mother, Claire Dunkle does an honest job at sharing her fight with Anorexia. It’s not east and it’s not short.

Everyone’s experience with an ED is different and their Road to recovery takes different paths. The author had a long and extremely daunting battle with FOOD that cost her almost everything.

How does one get to the bottom of that? Do we need to have reasons? Coming from a supportive family surely helps but how much can others help you unless you want to help yourself? The spiral of wanting to get better and realising that you are a lost cause is arduous.

‘Recovery is a path, not a destination.’

The inner-voice that keeps reminding of how you are nothing but a failure, of how you will always be a disappointment and how you will never see an end to this does not make it easy.

‘I’m part of you. I know what you’ve done. You’ll never get rid of me.’

One way to persevere is to find hope. Find something to hold on to. Find something that reminds you that you are loved. Find something that you love unconditionally.

Its not easy. It is not always at arms length. Elena vanishing shines light on the importance of finding the ‘Right help’. It’s a memoir that shows us the good and the bad, the boring and the interesting. It shows us what it is without glorifying any part of it and personally, that’s what spoke to me the most.

You will be left with knowledge and hopefully, empathy to help the brave souls like Elena on their journey after reading her story.

I teach high school English, mostly to juniors and seniors. My students LOVE this book. It is constantly checked out of my classroom library. Of course, they like stories about real people--particularly the struggles that people go through.

An interesting read for fans of the darker side of fairy stories. The plot wasnt what I was expecting but it kept my interest all the way through and I enjoyed all the different characters. There is a bit of a creep factor to several of the male characters that I didnt think was handled as well as it could have been, and the pacing was also an issue towards the end of the story but still enjoyable. I might check out the other books in the trilogy if I come across them but will leave them off my to read list for now.

This is the prequel to Wuthering Heights, which I haven't read, and it's short. I read half of it last night, since "The Simpsons" wasn't on. This is a moody, atmospheric book, full of spookiness and ghosts -- the kind of book you don't want to read just as you're moving to a new house.

*Review under construction*
Kate jumped to her feet. "You people are just ghastly!" she cried. The goblin King shook his striped hair out of his face and looked up at her with a smile.
"Which ones of us?" he asked.
"All of you! You wife stealers!"
"But I didn't steal you," replied Marak complacently.
"But you're just like that other King!"
Marak laughed as he shut the book. "No," he retorted, "I'm not green."
Kate was beside herself. "You know what I mean!" she shouted. "You're one of them! The descendant of all those wife-stealing Kings!"
He thought about that as she marched from the room. "I'm the descendant of all those wives, too," he mused, but Kate had already slammed the door.

I read this last night in one sitting. It's a young adult ghost story and I couldn't put it down. It is the story of Tabby (the Bronte's housekeeper) when she was a young girl and how she met Heathcliff prior to the story of Wuthering Heights. It's a pretty outrageous tale but I love ghost stories and I got drawn into it. It's fiction, of course, and likely to have never happened but it made for a good story. Not sure that I would have thought of this story if I wanted to explain Heathcliff's origin, but it is an interesting, imaginative take on what might have happened.

In brief, Tabby, an orphan, and a young boy, also an orphan, are brought to a haunted mansion somewhere in England where creepy things happen in the house and in the local village. I was surprised to find out just how creepy things really were.

And this story is probably a lot better if you don't relate it to Wuthering Heights at all and just accept it as a creepy 19th century ghost story.

This book was only alright to me. It was very...I'm not sure if I even have the right words to describe it, but distant is the best I can come up with. You are in a first person view but you never really get to feel anything. Things are being described, but I felt no attachment or meaning behind them, so I couldn't get really into the story.

This has to be one of my all time favorite books ever! I absolutely love Kate and Marak. This book is incredibly mature (and by that I don't mean graphic or sexual or anything like that, merely it depicts very dimensional and well rounded characters who aren't always goody-goody) for the audience that it is targeting. I have read and re-read this book a million times and will continue to do so because it just does not diminish for me. The world building is superb and the characters multi-faceted. Clare Dunkle is an amazing author!

You’ve caught a goblin, my dear, all for your very own.
----
Kate and Emily, having been recently and conveniently orphaned, arrive at their ancestral lands of Hallow Hall to live with their new guardian. But Hallow Hall is not theirs alone, and the goblin king who lives below will have his bride come hell or high water.

I didn’t realize The Hollow Kingdom was foundational YA fantasy, but having read this book I see so many shades of it in other stories. Holly Black clearly read this book (to the point where I can see several deliberate callouts in her work), and The Goblin Emperor also takes its cues from here, as does Spinning Silver. Dunkle isn’t inventing the wheel – she dedicates The Hollow Kingdom to Lloyd Alexander, who wrote his own foundational fantasy series. Nevertheless, The Hollow Kingdom is clearly an inspiration to many works that I’ve enjoyed.

I wish I could say that I enjoyed The Hollow Kingdom as much as I’ve enjoyed its successors. I certainly enjoyed the first half, where Kate uses her wits to escape the goblin king Marak again and again (no thanks to her sister Emily, who is clearly being set up for a sequel but otherwise plays little role in this book). Kate is a great protagonist: stubborn, brave, and very determined to stay above ground and not wedded to a goblin. I also quite enjoyed Dunkle’s worldbuilding, which has a lovely English folktale feel to it.

But the second half is honestly a disaster. Once Kate marries Marak, she basically gives up all fight and spunk and goes meekly to her fate. There’s a lot of character development that happen over rapid time skips, in which Kate goes from unwilling prisoner to “eh, it’s fine and I kinda like it down here.” Which is dumb character development. You can’t handwave character development in a time skip. You just can’t.

Not to mention the ending conflict comes out of left field and has almost nothing to do with the first half. And also not to mention the second half gets very bogged down introducing characters who will undoubtedly be of critical importance in the sequel.

So, in summary, good first half and terrible second half. But The Hollow Kingdom did inspire some of my favorite books, so I’ll forever be grateful for that. Just not grateful enough to bump it up a star.

Totally holds up over time. Haven’t read this book in probably 15 years and I couldn’t put it down.

I love this series. Books one and three are the strongest (book two spends the first half meandering before getting back to the plot), and I’m amazed at how much world-building and detail Dunkle can pack into such short books. I wish there were more (alas, she’s made it clear on her website there are no more to come and no movie ever). My only critique for book three is that I wish she’d spent more time building the relationship between Miranda and Nir. It happened a bit fast amidst all the other forces at work in the story. Book one is still probably my favorite, but there’s nothing quite as satisfying as re-reading a book you loved when you were young and finding it can still keep you reading late into the night.

Also, minor point—the covers of these books stink. The font, the artwork, everything. It’s my literary wish that all three could get a face lift!

The first third of the book spent too much time meandering on unrelated storylines, but about halfway through it picks back up and made me excited to read book 3 again!

An incredibly honest memoir about a young woman's struggle with her eating disorder. This book was so raw and heartbreaking that I could only manage to read small sections at a time. Overall, an incredibly inspiring and hopeful read that I would wholeheartedly recommend to the eating disorder community.

Clever tie-in to Wuthering Heights.

This memoir is haunting, beautiful, and hard to forget. From the outside, Clare's life seems perfect. She has a great job as children's book author and is raising her two smart and talented daughters in Germany with her loving husband. Clare's story shows us that even when you think everything is perfect, something can happen that can turn your whole world upside down. This book traces Clare's oldest daughter Valerie's battles with depression and mental illness and her youngest daughter Elena's life with anorexia, the eating disorder that almost kills her. Clare does not sugar coat any part of her story, and you can hear her despair and desperation in every word. It is both inspiring and heartbreaking to read about how hard Clare fights for her daughter's health, even when it seems like Elena will never recover. I highly recommend this book to all readers!

Laura W. / Marathon County Public Library
Find this book in our library catalog.

This story brings the reader into the mind of a girl, Elena, struggling with anorexia. It is a great inside look on this mental disorder for mature age groups while it features explicit incidents and sexual encounters. Elena's story is inspiring to those struggling with mental disorders because she does fight the voice in her head and starts to take control over her life. This memoir has made me rethink anorexia as so much more and deeper than just an obsession with being skinny. Though this story can be good for some people, this memoir is not sugar coated what so ever. Elena tells it like it is and even gave the true reality of how this disorder can end in death. This is not easy to read and I feel as though people with this disorder or similar disorders would be triggered by some of the writings, but this book does portray this painful truth about suffering with a mental disorder.

Something I discovered at work one day while shelving books. Once again I was captured by the premise of "goblins". The book tells the story of two sisters who are moving to a remote estate after the death of their father. Older sister Kate and her younger sister Emily move to Hallow Hill (where for thousands of years young women have been disappearing) with their cold guardian, and cousin who is determined to take back Hallow Hill as his own inheritance instead of the girls' at all costs. As luck would have it shortly after arriving Kate begins talking "nonsense" about a Goblin King named Marak Sixfinger who intends to kidnap her and make her his wife, as is the goblin custom to kidnap their brides (one of my favorite tropes). Kate is inexplicably good at avoiding capture, until her cousin in an attempt to force Kate into a Mental Asylum, convinces Kate that her sister has been kidnapped by the goblins, hoping for a reaction from her that would permit him to have her taken away and unable to inherit the estate. However Kate keeps her calm and walks right into the underground kingdom of the goblins and offers herself to Marak in exchange for her sister's safe return. (Be careful with how you word things when dealing with mythical creatures y'all!) Marak agrees and then reveals he has not taken her sister but it was, in fact, their cousin. So Marak and some goblins go and rescue Emily who once rescued demands she too be taken underground with the goblins because she refuses to be separated from Kate. So Kate marries the Goblin King and adventure ensues. I won't reveal the rest, and leave it for you to read and enjoy yourself.
Overall this was a good read. It it targeted towards middle grade readers so it tends to gloss over some topics, particularly the repercussions and implications of kidnapping brides. I would have enjoyed a more in-depth look at that. I would recommend this book to my fellow Labyrinth enthusiasts.

I actually liked this book better than the first two, only because it was a little less predictable.

It's okay. The Hollow Kingdom Trilogy isn't the best I've ever read but it's not the worst. That spot is saved for the Twilight series. However I'm the kind of person once you start a series, I must finish it. No matter how bad it is (i.e. Twilight series, but as a plus I can bash it with a clear conscious because I know first-hand how terrible it is). But I digress. The Hollow Kingdom books are a good read if you're not looking for much thought provoking reading.

This book was truly eye opening. Of course, we all know about eating disorders and the pain they cause, but I've never read something this in depth and real about it. Elena mentions in her afterword that she was always reading books that were too sugar coated and hopeful or that glorified eating disorders, so she decided to write one from her experiences, and that's just what she did. I kept waiting for her to get better and recover, and as it got closer to the end I realized it wasn't going to be that easy, because life isn't that easy. The things she went through took so much strength and willpower and she was so brave to put it all out there. The book was well written and I'm so glad Elena and her mother took the time to write it because I think it's going to be important to someone in need, who thinks they're alone in their struggles, to see that someone else went through so much pain and came out on the other side that much stronger. Would definitely recommend this. It's something everyone needs to know more about.

Elena's memoir was one that was difficult to read. I checked the back of the book to ensure that it wasn't written by her mother posthumously with her diaries.
She's shockingly honest without glorifying her illness. It took her years of treatment to see her eating disorder and years more to even try to tackle it. Brave, difficult, sad, enlightening, and truthful. On her website she talks about how she's still working on her recovery every day.

Dunkle tackled the difficult task of writing about how she felt during her time with an eating disorder without glamorizing it. This was a huge achievement that made the book well worth reading.

This was a gripping story how a 13 year old developed an eating disorder after the horror of being raped. This was a emotional roller coaster and definitely had me sobbing. What a brave woman to write about such a difficult time in her life!

Narrated by Emily Gray. In what turns out to be a prequel to an old classic novel (I won't reveal it here), Tabby Akroyd is brought in to be nursemaid to a blasphemous little boy who refers to himself as a “heathen git” and considers himself the master of Seldom House. Tabby has to refer to the boy as “Himself” because no one will tell her his name. There are other strange happenings at Seldom House, as Tabby encounters empty-eyed ghosts and indifferent house staff, and uncovers a horrifying pact about the keeping of Seldom House. I found narrator Gray’s British-accented voice a tad too bright and pert for interpreting a story involving the walking dead.

Has elements of a fairy tale, and a bit of Beauty and the Beast. A love story and fantasy combined.