A review by meganmilks
My Sister's Bones by Cathi Hanauer

4.0

the title of this book makes it sound more harrowing than it is: sure, there is some emotionally devastating content, but the eating disorder narrative is only one strand of many here, and the central theme of the book is the narrator coming of age emotionally and sexually while negotiating a complicated family dynamic in which her father is an overbearing control freak who has to be right about everything. i was pretty impressed with this book and its attention to class, place, and ethnicity as well as gender. the narrator and her family are jewish, and are living in a predominantly italian american neighborhood in new jersey; she has to confront ethnic stereotypes quite a lot, including her own. her admiration/emulation of italian american culture is particularly interesting in that it gives her a way to assert her self-identity as apart from her family's. lots of compassion for all characters; not a whole lot about the roots of her sister's anorexia or even her sister's pathology or symptomatology. the anorexia here, when it is discussed, is often tied to a critique of overconsumption. i haven't seen this connection in other books that i've read and was pleased to see anorexia linked to a politics distinct from societal pressures to be thin. not to be dismissive of those societal pressures or the eating disorders they breed -- at all -- but that in the hands of some authors that's ALL anorexia is, and the anorexic is then disdained for succumbing/selling out in wanting to be thin therefore beautiful. hanauer dramatizes multiple contributory factors of her character's eating disorder without actually pointing and saying "here."