Lia, age eighteen, is dying to become a Wintergirl. She and her childhood friend Cassie made a pact to transform their bodies into brittle, icicle-thin figures. In their minds, their ability to starve themselves to perfection would be the envy of all. But now Lia is alone—Cassie’s struggle with bulimia killed her, and Lia did not respond to Cassie’s phone calls on the last night she was alive. Haunted by Cassie’s death, Lia’s anorexia spirals her into a deeper and darker hollow. Surrounding Lia are fractured relationships with her parents, stepmother, and half sister. With raw pain and emotion, Laurie Halse Anderson renders a fierce and unrelenting portrait of a young woman’s struggle with a life-threatening eating disorder. Lia’s relationship with her body and with her family are conveyed with intensity and realism, told through Lia’s blunt, first-person, stream-of-consciousness narrative and emphasized with innovative text formatting. (Age 13 and older)

“Dead girl walking,” the boys say in the halls.
“Tell us your secret,” the girls whisper, one toilet to another.
I am that girl.
I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through.
I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.

Lia and Cassie are best friends, wintergirls frozen in matchstick bodies, competitors in a deadly contest to see who can be the skinniest. But what comes after size zero and size double-zero? When Cassie succumbs to the demons within, Lia feels she is being haunted by her friend’s restless spirit.

In her most emotionally wrenching, lyrically written book since the multiple-award-winning Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson explores Lia’s descent into the powerful vortex of anorexia, and her painful path toward recovery.