The Stone GirlAlyssa B. Sheinmel
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
Release Date: August 28, 2012
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 level 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 on 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.
I'm going to start by saying that I love Alyssa B. Sheinmel. This is only my second book that I've read by her, but I need to read more. She just has a way of putting so much emotion in her writing. In a way, the writing in this novel is very detached from the main character and story. This would normally not be a good thing, but it works with this subject matter.
Sethie was a very...interesting character. I don't have much to say about her besides that she was a very broken person. She had to go on a long journey in this novel, one that had to get worse before it got better. She wasn't really a character that I could relate to due to the situations, but I will say that I was rooting for her to get better throughout the novel.
This is a very graphic novel. In a way I was surprised by this, but this aspect really works to show the horrors of anorexia. This made the novel hard to read at times, but it really worked in the novel's favor.
Like I've said before, this book can be hard to read. This may be short, but it is no way a light read. It's really hard to watch Sethie be so dense.
Overall, The Stone Girl is a good book. Is it one that I will read again? Probably not. But it did leave an impression on me.
I read this a few months back after receiving it from netgalley. It was hard to read but it was very well done. I enjoyed it as much as a book about this subject can be enjoyed.
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