Thalia @ Pictures in the Words

As an overweight girl who dealt with body image issues all through school (though I was never bullied because of my weight), I was really excited to read this book. It seems to me that a lot of books about eating disorders or diet pill addictions are about girls who are already “skinny”, by definition. To me, it was going to be interesting to see something like that from a girl who really does need to lose weight, but goes about it all the wrong way.

However, I’m not quite sure what to think of this book. We get narrations from three girls–Krista (the “fat girl”), Tessa (her best friend), and Chelsea (the bully). I was, obviously, most excited for Krista’s narration, which was by far the most well written of the three and most engaging. Unfortunately, there wasn’t very much of it. Instead, we got a lot more from Chelsea, who has a pretty rotten home life and is involved with a much-older man, and the main character felt like Tessa–who didn’t deal with much relating to either Chelsea or Krista, and rather had almost a separate plot following her entirely. So if you’re looking for a book that really addresses bullying for being “too big”, then this might not be what you’ll want to pick up. The weight issue is actually thrown into the background for most of the book, and that, to me, was just sad.

An ARC of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

What I Liked: Spoilers!

• Despite her miniscule narration, I did manage to relate to Krista really well. I’ve never had an eating disorder and I would never order pills without my parents’ permission, but that feeling of inadequacy because you’re bigger is something I understand very well. Krista’s character captured how hard it is to be overweight (even slightly) in such a “skinny” world–models and stick-thin celebrities and girls who are a size double-zero and everything surrounding you all the time. It’s tough. Krista managed to show the difficulty of going through what she does, and even how seeing a picture of you blown up (even unaltered) can be incredibly difficult and ego-shattering. Her part in this story managed to make me like it enough to balance out the things that I didn’t quite understand or enjoy.

What I Didn’t Like:

• The writing style is very “in the moment”. It’s all in present tense, although two of the three girls state that they’re writing in journals–which doesn’t make sense, since half the time, Krista is too sick and incapable of doing anything (especially sitting down and writing in a journal) for it to be logically written in present tense. The style just didn’t stick well with me, which is kind of unfortunate–it affected how I felt about the entire story.

• The ending of this book was incredibly abrupt. Krista is at the hospital with her parents (did they find out about the pills? does she get to go home? will she recover from her eating disorder or even go back to school?), with no real answers to the questions the reader developed over the course of the novel. Even more abrupt is the ending with Chelsea–she recalls that she was led to a room by a man who had “tipped” her previously in the novel, and her “boyfriend”, Tyler, watches them leave–something awful happened at that party (I’m guessing she was raped or sexually assaulted in some fashion), but Chelsea doesn’t talk about what, and we’re sort of left hanging with the idea that Chelsea is somehow involved in a very terrible situation (to put it mildly). I mean…we don’t know what happened at all, and it’s almost like there’s an entire book left to go. That’s no resolution! Chelsea bullied Krista, and now our closure with her is that she gets raped and can’t get out because of her family situation? It was just confusing, and it really lost me there.

• Tessa seemed to be our resident main character–and it’s not like Tessa doesn’t deal with quite a bit (the death of her father in Afghanistan, being suspended, getting pushed around by Chelsea and her boyfriend), but…it’s not what I wanted to read the book for. I wanted to read a book about the pressures of being thin when you’re just…not. Tessa doesn’t deal with weight issues. She barely thinks about Krista, who is at home in bed for the majority of the novel. She didn’t seem to be a conflicted character, and wasn’t nearly as interesting a subject as either Chelsea or Krista. She was a study in plain, and she really didn’t capture me like a main character should. She was sweet, but pretty boring all in all, and her narration dominated the book.

Overall: This book has a little bit of redemption with Krista’s sections of the story being fairly well done. However, it’s outweighed by Chelsea’s and Tessa’s narrations, which are confusing and boring (respectively). I just wasn’t caught up in what was happening, like I ought to have been, and I was supremely stumped by the end as to why things ended the way they did. I have no idea if we’re supposed to take what’s happened to Chelsea as penance for how she treated Krista and Tessa, or if we’re supposed to pity her at the very end for what she’s gotten into. And Tessa was just uninteresting, and her story took up more room than the other characters’. All in all, a pretty average read, and only worth picking up if you find yourself very interested in the blurb. Intriguing if you’re looking for a book about struggling with weight, although not necessarily a book about weight issues.

(http://thaliasbooks.tumblr.com/post/67432564573/picture-me-review)