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I could have sworn I already reviewed this, but I checked my author tags and I don’t see it. I read this not too long after it first came out, and re-read it recently.
Anderson is probably best-known for Speak, which is notable for its completely believable teenage voice (if teenagers came with editors to remove the repetitive and boring parts) and enough wit and emotional honesty to allow it to avoid the usual clichés of stories about healing from trauma via art. It’s excellent. I also enjoyed Prom, a comedy about a working class girl’s machinations to create the Best Prom Ever, and Twisted, in which the hero is an angsty boy. In all of those, Anderson’s ear for teenage voices and sensitivity to teenage emotions is beautifully present. She’s also pretty funny.
I was underwhelmed by her historical novel Fever, and haven’t read Catalyst and Chains.
Wintergirls is right up there with Speak, though it’s more unrelentingly intense and less funny. It’s also, quite interestingly, maybe a fantasy and maybe not, a bit like Kathe Koja’s (also excellent) Blue Mirror. But I find the latter difficult to read as not fantasy, while Wintergirls teeters on the dividing line.
Lia, an anorexic teenager—no, wait, don’t go away! I swear, it’s not one of those books. Lia, an anorexic teenager, is haunted by the ghost of her best friend, who died alone after leaving repeated messages on Lia’s cell phone. Or maybe Lia is haunted solely by her own guilt. She is slowly drawn into, and walking herself toward, the underworld of suicidal madness, or maybe the frozen underworld of myth—in either case, the world of the dead. The book works beautifully with any of those interpretations or all of them at once, all the way down to the last page.
Anderson uses a number of typographical and structural tricks in this book—crossed out words, chapter numbers counting down, and others I won’t spoil by revealing— and they’re all there for a reason and they all work. The supporting characters, unusually for a novel which is so firmly set within the point of view of a character being sucked into a solipsistic state of mental illness, are sharply believable and non-stereotypical despite those constraints. (Since I know everyone who’s already read the book will be wondering, yes, I did indeed loathe the “free-spirited nonconformist” guy she gets involved with, but thankfully Anderson did not represent him as the undiluted essence of awesome that I dreaded the moment he launched into his defense of mooching food from other diners’ plates.)
This is one hell of an intense book (but not awesomely depressing), very well-written, and very worthwhile.
Wintergirls
Anderson is probably best-known for Speak, which is notable for its completely believable teenage voice (if teenagers came with editors to remove the repetitive and boring parts) and enough wit and emotional honesty to allow it to avoid the usual clichés of stories about healing from trauma via art. It’s excellent. I also enjoyed Prom, a comedy about a working class girl’s machinations to create the Best Prom Ever, and Twisted, in which the hero is an angsty boy. In all of those, Anderson’s ear for teenage voices and sensitivity to teenage emotions is beautifully present. She’s also pretty funny.
I was underwhelmed by her historical novel Fever, and haven’t read Catalyst and Chains.
Wintergirls is right up there with Speak, though it’s more unrelentingly intense and less funny. It’s also, quite interestingly, maybe a fantasy and maybe not, a bit like Kathe Koja’s (also excellent) Blue Mirror. But I find the latter difficult to read as not fantasy, while Wintergirls teeters on the dividing line.
Lia, an anorexic teenager—no, wait, don’t go away! I swear, it’s not one of those books. Lia, an anorexic teenager, is haunted by the ghost of her best friend, who died alone after leaving repeated messages on Lia’s cell phone. Or maybe Lia is haunted solely by her own guilt. She is slowly drawn into, and walking herself toward, the underworld of suicidal madness, or maybe the frozen underworld of myth—in either case, the world of the dead. The book works beautifully with any of those interpretations or all of them at once, all the way down to the last page.
Anderson uses a number of typographical and structural tricks in this book—crossed out words, chapter numbers counting down, and others I won’t spoil by revealing— and they’re all there for a reason and they all work. The supporting characters, unusually for a novel which is so firmly set within the point of view of a character being sucked into a solipsistic state of mental illness, are sharply believable and non-stereotypical despite those constraints. (Since I know everyone who’s already read the book will be wondering, yes, I did indeed loathe the “free-spirited nonconformist” guy she gets involved with, but thankfully Anderson did not represent him as the undiluted essence of awesome that I dreaded the moment he launched into his defense of mooching food from other diners’ plates.)
This is one hell of an intense book (but not awesomely depressing), very well-written, and very worthwhile.
Wintergirls