The Stone Girl
The Stone Girlby Alyssa B. Sheinmel
She feels like a creature out of a fairy tale; a girl who discovers that her bones are really made out of stone, that her skin is really as thin as glass, that her hair is brittle as straw, that her tears have dried up so that she cries only salt. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t hurt when she presses hard enough to begin bleeding: it doesn’t hurt, because she’s not real anymore.Sethie Weiss is hungry, a mean, angry kind of hunger that feels like a piece of glass in her belly. She’s managed to get down to 111 pounds and knows that with a little more hard work—a few more meals skipped, a few more snacks vomited away—she can force the number on the scale even lower. She will work on her body the same way she worked to get her perfect grades, to finish her college applications early, to get her first kiss from Shaw, the boy she loves, the boy who isn’t quite her boyfriend.Sethie will not allow herself one slip, not one bad day, not one break in concentration. Her body is there for her to work on when everything and everyone else—her best friend, her schoolwork, and Shaw—are gone. (goodreads.com)
So, yeah... I wrote out a super long post, went to spell check it and my blog's server went down and saved nothing except the summary above and the image. LOVELY. I am emotionally tapped from what I wrote, too. I just don't have it in me to rewrite it all. I am so not happy. Seems the servers must have gone down after the first auto-save because the others didn't work. ARGH.To sum it up:I didn't think I would like this novel, even though I am totally obsessed with issue novels and eating disorder stories. My main problem was that the story was written in third person, present tense and it was like fingernails on chalkboard to me. *shudder* But soon enough I was captured by Sethie and her problems and my breathing was difficult because I can't breath when anxious and this book was all sorts of emotional rollercoastery and it was just hard to get through. But hard in a good way.This book was a gift from a friend who knows me well. And although I never did suffer from an eating disorder, I had my own demons that were just as bad and although I thought I'd conquered them all long ago, I have been finding myself in new battles lately. Something about reading an issue novel is a weird sort of therapy for me, it almost quiets the demons in my shadow and helps me get some of the emotion I need to get out by reading rather than acting on impulses I shouldn't have to worry about anymore.My delicate head space these days truly appreciated this story and appreciated some of the brutal honest ways the story was told. Not everyone's issues are the same. They can be similar but never identical. And though I had tears in my eyes at the end of this story, I felt that it might have wrapped up a little too comfortably. It wasn't a Disney ending for sure, but it was a little too tidy for the rest of the story. That being said I did enjoy this book very much and it was just what I needed when I read it weeks ago.