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3.98 AVERAGE
3.98 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
I didn’t expect to love this book, and yet found myself drawn in and committed to Rose, Lily, and subsequently to Mim. The themes of trauma, eating disorders, queerness, Love, and want could have been too plodding or overwrought; but are treated with tender care and firm honesty. It’s tidy, but not too.
Thanks so much to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the digital galley of this one.
Before we begin, I’d like to note that I devoured this one in about, uhmmm, fourteen hours? Maybe less time. I was enthralled.
Twins Rose and Lily Winters have always been inseparable and impossible to tell apart, until puberty when Rose starts losing weight and Lily seems to gain it. Over the years, the disparity between their weight grows and as Rose receives in patient treatment for her anexoria, Lily continues to eat for the both of them and makes increasingly bad choices in men. When things reach a critical mass, Rose is determined to get better so, for once, she can save her sister.
One of the charcters in this book says that she doesn’t think there’s a single girl in America/the world (?) who doesn’t have body related issues, and as someone who has a long and complicated history with my own body in more than one way (who doesn’t), this book really hit me in the gut. Clarke manages to vocalize some thoughts and feelings I have had over the years but had never been able to accurately describe.
I’ve never been on the Lily side of some of these issues, but as someone who could in some ways identify with Rose, I really enjoyed their relationship and how both of them were damaged and needed to help each other heal from opposite sides of the same overall issue.
One of my favorite motifs of the book was the descriptions of the different kinds of love and how Rose tried to type everyone she knew by the love she thought they craved. There are some twists and turns that I don’t usually forgive in such tales, but here, they don’t seem to be used merely as a plot device. These events play major roles in the lives of the girls, and it serves a real purpose in development and healing.
This book is not light and there are so many trigger warnings, including eating disorders, extreme fad dieting, internalized homophobia, and sexual assault. If you can get through those things, though, it’s a really gripping narrative of healing from trauma.
It’s out now, and if you haven’t already, add it to your summer TBR, then maybe add a romcom for a chaser.
Before we begin, I’d like to note that I devoured this one in about, uhmmm, fourteen hours? Maybe less time. I was enthralled.
Twins Rose and Lily Winters have always been inseparable and impossible to tell apart, until puberty when Rose starts losing weight and Lily seems to gain it. Over the years, the disparity between their weight grows and as Rose receives in patient treatment for her anexoria, Lily continues to eat for the both of them and makes increasingly bad choices in men. When things reach a critical mass, Rose is determined to get better so, for once, she can save her sister.
One of the charcters in this book says that she doesn’t think there’s a single girl in America/the world (?) who doesn’t have body related issues, and as someone who has a long and complicated history with my own body in more than one way (who doesn’t), this book really hit me in the gut. Clarke manages to vocalize some thoughts and feelings I have had over the years but had never been able to accurately describe.
I’ve never been on the Lily side of some of these issues, but as someone who could in some ways identify with Rose, I really enjoyed their relationship and how both of them were damaged and needed to help each other heal from opposite sides of the same overall issue.
One of my favorite motifs of the book was the descriptions of the different kinds of love and how Rose tried to type everyone she knew by the love she thought they craved. There are some twists and turns that I don’t usually forgive in such tales, but here, they don’t seem to be used merely as a plot device. These events play major roles in the lives of the girls, and it serves a real purpose in development and healing.
This book is not light and there are so many trigger warnings, including eating disorders, extreme fad dieting, internalized homophobia, and sexual assault. If you can get through those things, though, it’s a really gripping narrative of healing from trauma.
It’s out now, and if you haven’t already, add it to your summer TBR, then maybe add a romcom for a chaser.
Thank you Netgalley for the advanced reading copy!
For a book about Thin Girls, it sure is heavy. I felt so weighed down the entire time reading it. Lily and Rose are twin sisters who are TOXIC for each other. In fact, all of the characters tear each other down and are straight up destructive towards one another. This changes at the end, but it took a toll on me. I am honestly glad the book is over because it was such a downer.
For a book about Thin Girls, it sure is heavy. I felt so weighed down the entire time reading it. Lily and Rose are twin sisters who are TOXIC for each other. In fact, all of the characters tear each other down and are straight up destructive towards one another. This changes at the end, but it took a toll on me. I am honestly glad the book is over because it was such a downer.
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Eating disorder, Mental illness, Toxic relationship
Moderate: Domestic abuse, Infidelity, Physical abuse
Minor: Body shaming, Death, Miscarriage, Rape, Sexual assault
I absolutely loved this book. I loved how it gracefully handled adolescence, adulthood, eating disorders, femininity, and queerness. A fantastic debut.
Thin Girls by Diana Clarke is a heartache of a debut. Our protagonists, twin sisters Rose and Lily, are utterly, fully, vividly human and their complicated relationships to their bodies and each other mirror many of the conscious and unconscious ways that women navigate the world. When Rose begins restricting her food intake in high school, Lily does the opposite, continuing to eat as a way to motivate her sister to do the same--or perhaps to compensate for Rose's lack of eating. This premise is only the beginning of the rollercoaster each sister faces while trying to recover from a variety of traumas over the course of their young adult lives.
Clarke's prose is extremely visceral, so much so that I hesitate to unflinchingly recommend the book to everyone I know as it may prove particularly triggering. However, the prose is, of course, also the novel's greatest strength. Clarke's first-person narration brings us deep into Rose's mind as she struggles to recover from the disordered eating that has defined nearly her entire life. Another narrative strength is the way Clarke punctuates sections of the present-day narrative with flashbacks to Rose and Lily's youth (complete with a date, their age, and their respective weights at the time of the flashback) and factoids that Rose has acquired about topics like animals, insects, sexuality, and disordered eating.
(On a personal note, something I found interesting about Rose's character was the way she could not bring herself to eat food for a majority of the novel but has this voracious mental appetite, consuming information that adds so much insight into how her brain works and also provides different lenses for framing her approaches to the relationships... her relationship to Lily, to other women in the facility, to her childhood friends and crushes, and to her own self and body.)
Finally, some of the moments that stuck with me the most were the quieter ones: the moments of naming all the ways women unconsciously speak of their weight and relationship to food, the tiny reminders of how we've been socialized to shrink ourselves and how--internalized so deeply--these small moments are actually the biggest ones. (One passing scene in a coffeeshop where Rose and her group of anorectic friends watch another group of friends share a piece of cake and then shame themselves for eating it/leave the last bite on the plate.... it was a passing scene but really left an impression about how comments like "I'm so fat" or "Wow gonna have to work out extra hard today to make up for this!" have become so normalized that they are nearly a part of most women's eating rituals.)
Clarke's prose is extremely visceral, so much so that I hesitate to unflinchingly recommend the book to everyone I know as it may prove particularly triggering. However, the prose is, of course, also the novel's greatest strength. Clarke's first-person narration brings us deep into Rose's mind as she struggles to recover from the disordered eating that has defined nearly her entire life. Another narrative strength is the way Clarke punctuates sections of the present-day narrative with flashbacks to Rose and Lily's youth (complete with a date, their age, and their respective weights at the time of the flashback) and factoids that Rose has acquired about topics like animals, insects, sexuality, and disordered eating.
(On a personal note, something I found interesting about Rose's character was the way she could not bring herself to eat food for a majority of the novel but has this voracious mental appetite, consuming information that adds so much insight into how her brain works and also provides different lenses for framing her approaches to the relationships... her relationship to Lily, to other women in the facility, to her childhood friends and crushes, and to her own self and body.)
Finally, some of the moments that stuck with me the most were the quieter ones: the moments of naming all the ways women unconsciously speak of their weight and relationship to food, the tiny reminders of how we've been socialized to shrink ourselves and how--internalized so deeply--these small moments are actually the biggest ones. (One passing scene in a coffeeshop where Rose and her group of anorectic friends watch another group of friends share a piece of cake and then shame themselves for eating it/leave the last bite on the plate.... it was a passing scene but really left an impression about how comments like "I'm so fat" or "Wow gonna have to work out extra hard today to make up for this!" have become so normalized that they are nearly a part of most women's eating rituals.)
Most of this book was a 3 star one for me but the ending bumped it up to 3.5. I was intrigued with the posting of the weight of the girls and watching how the distance became larger and larger. I realize that recovering for eating disorders is not quite as simple as portrayed in the book but ideally, if you had an eating disorder, this seems like it would be the gentlest, longest lasting type of recovery.
This book swallowed me, chewed me up, and spit me back out. Beautiful, haunting, and heartbreaking story unlike any I’ve read before. The writing ripped my guts out, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. This one will stay with me for a long while.
WOW. So many hard topics covered in this book but I’m in awe. This is absolutely one of those books that I will be thinking about for months and months. I’m so impressed and I definitely teared up a little bit.