Review: Elena Vanishing by Elena Dunkle and Clare B. Dunkle

First, thanks to Edelweiss and Chronicle Books for allowing me to read an egalley of this title.  This is a hard book to review.  It was definitely a very interesting read,  but still a hard one to read.  I always want to read books about eating disorders or weight loss memoirs because I feel like they are something I can relate to, or else just something I need to read.  And while no one will ever accuse me of being anorexic, and I could never be because I like to eat, it was scary to realize that some of the things the author thought are very similar to things I think without realizing.

Elena is the author and the main character of the book.  The story is about her life with an eating disorder, anorexia to be specific.  And while she'd really had it before the first part of the book, we kind of start up from the time when someone first points out to her and her family that might be what it is.  It starts when her health first begins to truly suffer, with a heart problem.  She is able to fight the diagnosis of anorexia, at one of the hospitals they even say something like she weighs too much for what they usually take for that program.  What gets to me is how she doesn't eat.  I can't skip meals very often because I get a headache, that gets worse as I go longer without eating.  And then I get nauseated, so much that it is hard to eat to cure the headache which led to the nausea.  While Elena doesn't really have bulimia, there are times that when she is made to eat she does throw up. But she knows how to do it without ruining her teeth, something she is proud of when she hears another girl throwing up in the bathroom at one point.  I can't imagine being as horrible about something as she is.  I can't imagine not wanting help.  But again, I don't have the same issue she has.

As someone who is always conscious about weight and what I look like these days, there were times when her inner voice was very familiar to me.  The thought that when she walked away people were talking about her, calling her fat, or ugly, or something along those lines.  I know that it isn't really a voice to me like it was to her, but I know I have those thoughts about what girls that I walk by think of me, or guys, even people I know I often think they're probably thinking things about me.   So that is what made it hard to read.

I do know that I now want to read the mother's kind of alternate point of view in her own book called Hope and Other Luxuries:  A Mother's Life With a Daughter's Anorexia.  From reading and hearing how her mother acted, and knowing that Elena totally had to be misinterpreting things, I just need to read the mother's side.  The mother's name may be familiar to readers as she is a writer.  I've even read her Hollow Kingdom series and enjoyed it.

So while I do recommend the book if you want to read about the struggles of someone with anorexia, I do warn you to be prepared for how hard it is to read.  How many times you just want to shake Elena and tell her to try, stop giving in to it!  Even when I found out what began it, and you understand why that caused it when she talks through it with the counselors at the end of the book, I still wanted her to just try.  I'm not putting what happened to her down as nothing big, as I also had something similar happen to me, only when I was much older.  But a good, hard read, and when you know how her family had had to deal with her older sister even before she started having the problems, you can see how it all kind of snowballed into such a giant deal.  

Review: The Revelation of Louisa May by Michaela MacColl

First, thanks to Chronicle Books and Edelweiss for allowing me to read an e-galley of this.  Now, I have to admit that I've never read Little Women, or seen the movie, or read anything by Louisa May Alcott.  But, I'd never read Jane Eyre until I read the book The Eyre Affair.  While this was an okay story, not sure that it makes me need to read any of her books.  I was intrigued though, as I always am, by any book that takes a look at an author's life, especially fictional books because they can add in some fun details. 

This story is about Louisa May Alcott's life when she was about 15 and her mother had to go work in another city to bring the family money.  I guess I didn't realize that the author lived in a community with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.  I really liked that bit of history that was woven into the story.  Louisa's family was also very much into the abolitionist movement,  to the point of being part of the Underground Railroad.  In the story, when Louisa's mother goes to the job she leaves Louisa in charge of the household, which includes not only doing the housework, cooking and cleaning for her father, but also watching her younger sister Beth, while her mother took the youngest, May, with her.  The household management included a "package", the runaway slave George, who showed up right as Louisa's mother, Marmee, was leaving. 

For Louisa's first time being in charge, things didn't go that smoothly, because at the same time she had a slave to protect, a slave catcher showed up in town looking for him.  And the slave catcher happened to know Henry, as well as another woman that wasn't trusted, Miss Whittaker.  One somewhat happy thing that seemed to occur was that Louisa's cousin Fred showed up.  While they used to be the best of friends, Fred had changed.  He'd grown up into a very handsome young man, and seemed to be interested in Louisa as more than a friend/cousin as well. 

When one of the players in the story turns up dead towards the end, the trials of the story soon turn into a murder mystery, one that Louisa feels she must solve, even if it means that someone she loves and respects, or feels sympathy for, is a murderer. 

I have to say the mystery was a good one, there was lots of story with actual factual bits sprinkled throughout as well.  While it gave me a bit of a history legend on some authors I didn't know that much about, as I said before, I will personally not be adding any of their books to my TBR at this time.  I think that the writing is probably done a lot like Alcott does in her books, at least it reminded me of how I think that the books were written, from what little I know of them. 

If you like the author Alcott's books, I'm guessing you'll enjoy this.  If you enjoy a good murder mystery, with some historical fiction thrown in, you'll also probably enjoy this.  I will definitely be adding it to my list of books to possibly order into the high school library where I work because of all the historical bits and the link to the authors' real lives.  I like that at the end there is even a few pages telling what everything was based on, and where truth and fiction intersected.

Absent by Katie Williams

First I must say thank you to Chronicle Books and Edelweiss for allowing me to read an e-galley of this book.
This was a good ghost story.  The main character is Paige, who has recently died from falling off the roof of her school.  She wakes up and can't leave the school grounds, in fact, the minute she tries to cross the line that marks the end of the school property, she is immediately back at the spot where she died, on the roof of the school.  She is not alone though, while no one seems to know she is there, that is no one living, there are two other teen ghosts, Evan and Brooke.  Paige knows Brooke, she died of a drug overdose at the school earlier in the year.  In fact, Paige's "secret" boyfriend, Lucas, was the one who found Brooke.  Evan on the other hand, has been there longer, they don't know who he is, and they can tell from his clothes that it was a past time.  While all day Evan goes to class, especially to the art teacher, Mr. Fisk's class, Brooke acts like the sullen stoner type girl she was in real life, Paige walks around and hears people say that she jumped.  But Paige had no reason to jump, and from what she remembers, she fell.  Soon Paige figures out that when people are thinking about her, she can possess their bodies, at least until they try to leave school property.  And she is going to change that horrible gossip.  And not only that, her best friend Usha seems to believe it and be mad at her!  Paige is so upset when she hears that Usha doesn't want to paint a memorial mural, especially when she figures out that the more people who see the mural, the more people will think about her, and the more she can possess people and try to change their minds.
While jumping into different people and trying over and over to change this gossip, Paige learns things, things that may explain a few more almost deadly injuries that occur to kids in the school.  She also goes and jumps in the body of the gossip girl that she feels started the lies, Kelsey, one of the popular girls.  She hopes if she gets her to take the thing back, people will believe, but as soon as she's out of Kelsey's body, she tells everyone she doesn't know why she said those things.  Paige is so mad, she tries to humiliate Kelsey by having her ask out a stoner, loser boy, one that seems to have had a thing for Paige.  Turns out that Kelsey and the boy, Wes, may get along better, and Paige may really have done her a favor.  We soon find out that maybe Paige's death wasn't an accident, was it something to do with Lucas, who seemed to be using her?  Did she really jump?  Or, well, I won't give it away, I'll let you read and find out for yourself!