2.5.

Sethie is a very broken girl. While she could easily be labeled as a girl with an eating disorder, her challenges are much greater. She's depressed and that is what causes her to become needy, to seek control when it comes to her body and her weight, to use drugs heavily, to become extremely dependent on her cheating boyfriend and a girl who is anything but a real friend to her.

I appreciated how Sheinmel wrote this in the third person, removing the reader from Sethie, just as she's so far removed from herself. I believe the representation of the eating disorder is fair and the experience authentic. This is a very blunt story, and the extremes Sethie goes to in both her weight control and in her drug use are explicit. She's a very sheltered girl and frankly, she doesn't know what she's doing. (view spoiler)[ There's a scene where she's with a bunch of classmates in the empty apartment in her building and she's shocked that a dime bag cost $40. That's how sheltered she is. (hide spoiler)] That's probably what made this so disturbing to read (and I don't mean that in a bad way but in an honest way). She's a good character at heart, but she's painfully naive.

However, the story was flat for me. I never felt Sethie grew much. At the very end there's the start of an arc for her, but it didn't leave me with much. I found myself bored reading about drug use and about her hatred for her body. I needed more of her thought. More of her emotional struggle. The third person is tricky in that it does limit this aspect of a character's growth. More than that, though, I feel like I've read so many books that touch upon eating disorders, and they do them with varying levels of success. There should be a variety of books touching on topics like this because real life experiences ARE so varied, but this was one of the weaker ones. I wanted more than what I got, and I almost feel like Sethie herself deserved more, too.

This reminded me of Zailcka's memoir SMASHED from a few years back in terms of how the issues -- of which there are many -- are presented, in sort of a series of experiences, rather than a more solid and coherent narrative. It's a chicken and an egg situation, wherein the complicated spiral of depression-eating disorder-drugs-drinking are hard to tease apart from one another.

I wouldn't pass Sheinmel's book off to younger readers looking for an ED or book about a character dealing with depression; it's much more mature. But because of Sethie's voice, because of the writing itself, it reads quite young.

Ultimately, I think this will be forgettable for me.