Don't misunderstand this novel: It's not about anorexia. It's about two sisters and how they related to their father. Also one of them happens to be anorexic. It's also just poorly written. About halfway through I found the need to check if it was self-published. (It wasn't.) ( )

Don't misunderstand this novel: It's not about anorexia. It's about two sisters and how they related to their father. Also one of them happens to be anorexic. It's also just poorly written. About halfway through I found the need to check if it was self-published. (It wasn't.) ( )

This book is so bad on many levels. The writing is really lackluster and disjointed, the editing is non-existent. The use of different sized fonts was excessive and unnecessary (especially in the case of the ampersand being in some fancy script font and twice as big as needed).

I feel like the plot has potential, maybe, in the most rudimentary form of it.

And this author needs to seriously get a proofreader/editor to prevent random numbers appearing in the text "wh7en", "hate.0" and things like "uself".

Big, giant thumbs down. ( )

Skinny by Ibi Kaslik is about a girl, Giselle, who becomes obsessed with self destruction and anorexia. It is told by her younger sister’s view, who is much different than Giselle. I dropped the book because it flip flopped between their lives and became too complicated for me to follow. I didn’t like how they portrayed the disease of anorexia, they showed it as something that is very easy to get over and it only is shown in social situations which I don’t think is true. I do not recommend this book.

From November 2006 SLJ
In her first year of med school, twenty-two-year-old Giselle Vasco seems to have it all together. But a lifetime of bitter relations with her deceased father is slowly catching up, and she falls into a downward spiral that her mother and her younger sister Holly are powerless to stop. Skinny, though, is much more than a study of one young woman’s battle with anorexia. What starts as the story of Giselle quickly develops into a rich and powerful tapestry of a whole family. When Thomas and Vesla Vasco emigrated from Hungary in the 1970s to escape communism’s rigid caste system, Vesla was already pregnant, and Thomas always had questions about whether the baby is his. His doubts color his whole relationship with his oldest daughter, and when Holly is born 8 years later, the divide becomes more apparent. Holly, a natural athlete who revels in her strength and her appetites, struggles to understand and avert her sister’s self-loathing. The chapters alternate between the voices of Giselle and Holly, and the ability to see the events unfolding through the eyes of both sisters adds a depth and a poignancy that would not have been possible with a single narrator. Ibi Kaslik’s first novel hits the mark with characters with whom teens will empathize, and tackles a relevant and painful subject with grace. A first purchase for high schools seeking fiction that frankly addresses eating disorders. ( )