I laughed, I cried, I screamed when it ended!! ( )

Mixed feelings. A lot of how I feel about it is based on how self-aware the book was, which I'm still not totally sure of (idk how to explain it without spoilers though). I wish there were a couple of healthy relationships to balance out the shitshow that every other relationship was. Strongly don't recommend this for anyone struggling with an eating disorder-- it gives so many tips about how to be anorexic and IDK why other reviews aren't really talking about that.
I also thought the facility seemed a bit unrealistic but then again, what do I know? All of this said, I think that if I had read it in 10th grade or something, it would have been one of my favorite books, so a solid 3.5 rounded up. ( )

This book was both notably imperfect and also/still really dazzling. As an authorial choice I thought it was brave to have the narrator speak in the voice of a woman with anorexia. ED's run in my family. (Just my generation, hopefully never again.) At the height of my binging and purging another relative was hospitalized for anorexia and my mother said it was too bad I "couldn't get a touch of that." She was kidding/ not kidding. Bulimia left me with those swollen acid eroded cheeks -- fat faces were not encouraged. In addition to family ties, the disordered find one another, so I have been around a lot of people with ED's. One thing I can say authoritatively is that people with active ED's are boring as hell. There is a constant script going on in your head that makes it impossible to engage meaningfully in other things. You can get things done sure, but your emotional life is all about you and your downtime is all about food whether you are obsesively cooking and baking for others so you can watch them eat or calculating the ratio of calories taken in to calories require to burn off the food you ingest, or taking care of one of the many other tasks of the disordered. Rose exemplified that. For me she did not get interesting as a character until she started to realize she had to recover, and she got more and more interesting as her story went on from there. But even when Rose was boring I was engrossed with her story, and with Lily's whose quest for approval, love, and comfort was even more compelling for me than Rose's quest for control, both had a need to be noticed that was never quenched.

Clarke is a very good writer at the sentence level. There are some breathtaking similes, and each sentence shines. She also does a great job of bringing to the fore what is, I think, the book's central point, that we tell girls and women to be obsessed with eating and exercise, to watch out for extra pounds, cellulite, lack of a thigh gap instead of teaching them to be afraid of men who belittle them, who hit them, who grope them, and who jerk off looking through your windows. It is really effective -- especially since most of this messaging about body comes from other women. We are our own worst enemies, and Clarke really brings it home. Other women are also our best friends once they agree to stop pushing that agenda, and Clarke covers that effectively as well. I did think the pacing was off in the first part, and that Clarke missed some good opportunities and failed to explore some of the other stories she starts. I thought the Cat storyline could have been a powerhouse, but she kept cluttering up the dynamic with repeated references to the smell of vomit and cutaways to the early Rose and Lily life which could have been shaved down with no loss to the story, (I had issues both with the amount of time spent on the girls' early years, and the way she cut into dramatic arcs with lengthy flashbacks of yet another shitty guy Lily was dating and yet another time Lily tried to include Rose in activities.) I also wish that time had been spent on Sarah, who is Rose's best friend, but we don't see that relationship at all.

Overall I really enjoyed this read. One note, there are some people who reviewed this as a 1-star because it triggered them. That is bullshit (and also a good illustration of the self-involvement of people with EDs.) That means it was well-written. But yeah, if you are living with an eating disorder, or are in recovery at a point where relapse is possible, do not read this book. This seems really obvious, but apparently not. ( )

If you have a history of eating disorders, there will be lot of triggers in this book. Narrated by a twin sister who felt she needed to lose weight to become part of the in-crowd. Now in a treatment program, Rose describes what her life is like. This is an excellent debut novel. The relationship between the identical twins in interesting. Some of the things seemed a bit contrived but did not detract from the story. Its an interesting look at how society judges women by their looks. ( )

This book will most likely become one of the most important books of this summer. This is an adult novel that wants to be a teen or YA novel -and if I had a teen who wanted to read this book, I would definitely want to read this along with her so I could answer any questions she had.

So why then did I rate it so low? Because it pulled too many triggers for me -eating disorders, lesbianism, dysfunctional families, foul language (although in context), bullies, and abusive relationships. It was deep, dark, and tried, in my opinion, too hard to be literary and clever.

*ARC supplied by the publisher. ( )