Winter Girls

Laurie Halse Anderson has a tendency to write about "issues" that are real, heart-breaking and emotional. She digs underneath the skin. She puts us there and helps us feel the characters pain. Their pain can be related to many teens everywhere.

Winter Girls deals with anorexia and death of best friend and also pulls us into the perspective of divorced parents and over controlling parents.

Lia is a senior and had been in and out of treatment centers for her eating disorder. Her and her best friend, Cassie, made a pack, bet per say that they will be the skinniest girls ever. They were very depressed and living in a state of mind where they weren't dead, but weren't alive either. They were Winter Girls.

Lia lives with her professor father and her evil step-mother, Jennifer and her step-sister. Her mother is a doctor and very overbearing, always asking about her weight and eating habits.

Cassie died one night and tore Lia apart. Lia saw Cassie in her dreams and had 33 messages from her the night she died. Could she have saved her? Should she die to?

Anderson writes to bring her audience in. She wanted us to scream at Lia and cry for Cassie dying alone. She wanted us to feel the pain and struggle of the family memebers close by.She uses many techniques to help writing convey emotions. She had two blank pages and repetitive words and phrases giving the reader a chance to think about the emotional pull and bring the important facts up over and over again.

Later, Lia cuts herself to be with Cassie. She is fortunately saved. Winter Girls can be saved. And if you are a winter girl, you are not alone!

Anderson's novels help teens feel "normal" and help them struggle through the tough times they may face, but are not meant for everyone to read because they coul cause depresion. This book was hard to read because of all the descriptions in cutting and the dier need to be thin and perfect. We all have to sit back and realize what is perfect for one will not always be perfect for everyone!

song that goes with book talk

book talk

Alicia Kenison
EDU 330
Clarissa Thompson
10-18-10

You Remind Me of You
By: Eireann Corrigan

Close your eyes

Imagine a girl who weights 80 lbs. She’s a sophomore in high school. She eats and eats and eats. And then, she runs and runs and runs. She forces herself to hit that 80 lb mark again. Her father follows her in the station wagon, in case, she faints on her run. She showers when she gets home and sometimes her father has to come and pick up her naked body from the wet tub. He has to listen for the tumble and quickly switch the water from hot to cold.

Do you see her?

Do you feel her pain?

Now, imagine a boy. This girl was in love with him. They were going to go to prom together, but one of his friends’s called her and told her the rumor. Daniel thought she was fat. That word stabbed her like the kitchen knife she was washing.

How would you feel if you had to force feed the girl you loved?

How would you feel if your second home was a chair next to her bedside?

Would you get sick of holding her hair back as she puked up everything she just ate?

After awhile wouldn’t you feel guilty? Daniel did. He started doing drugs. He got so depressed, he attempted suicide while his sister was upstairs and she was chatting on the phone to their mother, who was on a business trip.

Eireann and Daniel were going to be seniors in high school and now they were in two different hospitals. This love brought them closer. They visited each other all the time hospital to hospital. They kept each other alive.

This is a coming of age story with love, harm and recovery. This is a poetry memoir of real life and is incredibly more emotional than other issue book because it is real. Her poetry flows from happy to sad or sad to happy. She has a way of keeping the audience focused and brings raw emotion into our lives.

I don’t feel this is a book for everyone and I would definitely not teach it unless I feel my students could handle it.