So if you know me, you know that I love reading books about people with mental illness. I love feeling like I am not alone or broken. That my struggles really are struggles. That there are others out there that understand me. Who doesn’t like feeling that way? I do not have an eating disorder, but a friend recently revealed to me that she does. I wanted to know a bit more about everything without burdening her with being my teacher. Reading this book is just one of the steps I am taking so I can learn and support her better.
So this book was almost perfect for me. It had two major issues that got in the way of me rating this five stars. The first is hopefully going to be fixed before it is officially released in less than a month. That is the formatting. All the dialogue is done without quotation marks or designation of who is speaking, which sort of makes sense, but is also super annoying. It can be hard to keep track of who is talking at times, especially when getting used to that style of dialogue. It makes sense because everything is so blurred and unreal to Anna that it makes sense that having something like dialogue be that concrete wouldn’t be fitting. So I can get behind it, but this is where the big issue is, but I need there to be an easier way to tell what is dialogue and what is flashback. They are formatted exactly the same. The whole flashback is in italics, but so is the dialogue in the flashbacks. There were points in the book where a flashback started on the same line as a dialogue so it took me forever to catch on that suddenly we were in Paris and it was years ago. So this formatting issue is huge. It often pulled me out of the story and made it so it just didn’t flow. If I am constantly having to reassess where I am and when I am, then I am no longer immersed in the world.
The second issue I had was the issue of the last chapter. I can get why it was there, but it wrapped things up too neatly for me. After all the statistics from the manual were given, I was hoping that it would be more open ended, leaving the idea of if Anna relapsed or not up to me. Leaving her in that vulnerable space for a bit longer for more impact at the end. Instead it was a HEA like you would get in a romance novel. It just felt odd and tacked on.
The way the treatment center worked brought me back to my time in the psychiatric hospital. The way that the workers had no names only positions was YES. It made so much sense. I got so much more out of being around others in my position than I got from pretty much any professional in that setting. I remember hiding food in my room, just because I could, not because I even wanted it. The little acts of rebellion that gave me a high. I never did eat that peanut butter that I stole from the lunch room. The way that visitation worked. The way that everyone watched who did and did not have a visitor. So much of it felt so perfectly life like. It made me regress to those feelings. It made me remember every little detail of being in the hospital and what those small milestones meant. When someone you cared about, but never really expected to see again visits. The way that connecting with someone else feels, the way you feel when they relapse or when they get discharged. It was all so vibrant and fresh. It was perfectly written down to the condescending calling of all of the women “girls” in the weird power move that the professionals use to distance themselves from patients and to reinforce the power structure. It was just wonderful.
I could go on forever about this book and what every single word did to me. I am a huge fan and I look forward to more books by Zgheib. She has a control of the story that was able to put this very intense internal struggle into light. The story us paced beautifully. It is slow, steady, often frustrating. It worked so perfectly with the feelings that Anna was having.
I just have one question: was the name of Anna intentional? It could very easily be a play on the idea of the “my friend Ana” idea that you can find online if you are particularly into that idea (I have seen more people use it as a way to praise anorexia and encourage others to continue down the wrong path than people using it to help them heal, though I can only hope that has changed since I was last really in the eating disorder world).