Review of Wintergirls

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson is an awesome book for young teenage girls to read. It goes into depth about a teenage girl named Lia who struggles with an eating disorder that seperates Lia and her best friend. Her eating disorder also makes her relationship with her mother difficult. Her mother is a doctor, and so when dealing with her daughters eating disorder she acts more as her doctor than her mother. Young girls are constantly struggling with their weight and are obsessed with being skinny. They think that just not eating will make them "healthy", healthy is not just being stick skinny. Wintergirls takes young girls through the struggles and loses of having an eating disorder. It helps you understand that eating disorders are not healthy and in fact can kill you, seeing as how it took Lia's best friends life. In this book Lia also has a problem with cutting herself, now a days cutting is a serious problem. Many young girls cut for the same reason they develop eating disorders, they're depressed, their parents are divorced, they feel like they're not good enough, or there's a bigger problem that they don't want to talk about. Lia has been in and out of treatment facilities trying to conquer her eating disorder, and every time she fools her family, and the people at the treatment facility. She couldn't see how much the people around her cared about her. After her friend had died, and was haunting her she saw that she couldn't keep doing what she was doing.