2017 Debut Authors Bash with Giveaway - Featuring Alexandra Ballard Talking about Her Inspiration and Research for Her Debut Novel: What I Lost #17DABash

I'm participating in this fun yearly event once again hosted by YA Reads.  I'm lucky enough to be posting about two authors this year, so make sure to check back later this month for another fun post.  I read What I Lost this past summer, and you can check out my review of it HERE.

Book info:
Title:  What I Lost
Author:  Alexandra Ballard
Genre:  YA Contemporary, Eating disorders, Anorexia
Release Date:  June 6th, 2017
Publisher:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Pages: 304
Formats:  Hardcover, ebook 

Synopsis:
What sixteen-year-old Elizabeth has lost so far: forty pounds, four jean sizes, a boyfriend, and her peace of mind. As a result, she’s finally a size zero. She’s also the newest resident at Wallingfield, a treatment center for girls like her—girls with eating disorders. Elizabeth is determined to endure the program so she can go back home, where she plans to start restricting her food intake again.She’s pretty sure her mom, who has her own size-zero obsession, needs treatment as much as she does. Maybe even more. Then Elizabeth begins receiving mysterious packages. Are they from her ex-boyfriend, a secret admirer, or someone playing a cruel trick?

 

This eloquent debut novel rings with authenticity as it follows Elizabeth’s journey to taking an active role in her recovery, hoping to get back all that she lost.

Find it: Amazon, Barnes and Noble. The Book Depository, iBooks, Goodreads


For this post I've got some great information to share with you from the author.  I asked her where she got her inspiration for What I Lost, as well as what kind of research was needed for a book on the serious topic of eating disorders.  Here is what she had to say:

Back in 2012, I joined a writing group and sat down to write, seriously, for the first time. I'd just left my job as a middle school teacher and had this vague idea that I might try to fulfill a dream I'd had since I was a little girl--to publish a book. I had no idea what stories, if any, would come out of me. All I wanted to do was write--something, anything. And for a few weeks, I did just that. I wrote about my life, my kids, my husband. And then, slowly, a voice started to form. It was my main character, 16-year-old Elizabeth, a typical American teenager who was screwing up her life in a big way. She shoplifted from Target, inadvertently gave her friends’ secrets away, constantly fought with her parents, and was, in general, miserable. It wasn’t until a few weeks in did I realize what was really going on with her. She had an eating disorder (ED), like I had years ago, and it was getting worse.

Over time, I realized that the heart of the story wasn’t with Elizabeth’s antics at school or with her friends. It was with her illness and the people she met when she was forced to get help at an inpatient treatment facility I named Wallingfield. That’s when WHAT I LOST was really born.

While the events and characters in the book are all fictional, many of the emotions and feelings (especially towards ranch dressing!) came from the heart.

That said, I still did quite a bit of research not only on anorexia, but also how to treat it. I studied up on everything from what a patient eats at a facility like Wallingfield, to how group therapy sessions are run, to the medical complications, to the latest genetic research, to how to portray EDs responsibly when writing. I spoke to therapists and tried my best to make sure I represented the disease in a realistic, responsible light.

One element that was extremely important to me was that my book do no harm. There are all sorts of guidelines online on how to write responsibly about anorexia. The last thing I wanted was for my book to be able to be used as a how-to guide to not eat, but at the same time, I wanted my novel to be specific and real. I did my best to carefully balance what details and behaviors I included so that readers would get a clear picture of the disease while also not including so much that anybody with an eating disorder would come away with new techniques and tips for restricting his or her food intake. I did have to include some details, like specific weights and meals, so that the reader could accurately picture the characters, but I did so as sparingly as I could.

When I finished writing WHAT I LOST, I realized that this book had been burning a hole inside me, waiting to come out for a long time. That’s what is so fascinating about writing--it’s like a portal into the inner workings of your mind. Maybe that’s why I love it so much. It continually surprises me. I didn’t sit down to write a book about a girl in an ED treatment center, but that’s the story I needed to tell, and so I did, and I am thankful every day for Elizabeth and the rest of the cast of characters in my book. They made me a better person and writer.

About the Author: 

Alexandra Ballard has worked as a magazine editor, middle-school English teacher, freelance writer, and cake maker. She holds master's from both Columbia (journalism) and Fordham (education) and spent ten years in the classroom, beginning in the Bronx and ending up in the hills of California. Today she writes full time and lives in the Bay Area with her husband, two daughters, and two dogs. What I Lost is Alexandra's first novel.
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Instagram

Giveaway:

• 1 copy of What I Lost - open to US and Canada

  a Rafflecopter giveaway

Blog Tour with Review and Giveway: What I Lost by Alexandra Ballard

Book info:

Title:  What I Lost
Author:  Alexandra Ballard
Genre:  YA Contemporary, Eating disorders, Anorexia
Release Date:  June 6th, 2017
Publisher:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

Pages: 304
Formats:  Hardcover, ebook
Source:  E-galley from Publisher

Synopsis:

What sixteen-year-old Elizabeth has lost so far: forty pounds, four jean sizes, a boyfriend, and her peace of mind. As a result, she’s finally a size zero. She’s also the newest resident at Wallingfield, a treatment center for girls like her—girls with eating disorders. Elizabeth is determined to endure the program so she can go back home, where she plans to start restricting her food intake again.She’s pretty sure her mom, who has her own size-zero obsession, needs treatment as much as she does. Maybe even more. Then Elizabeth begins receiving mysterious packages. Are they from her ex-boyfriend, a secret admirer, or someone playing a cruel trick?

This eloquent debut novel rings with authenticity as it follows Elizabeth’s journey to taking an active role in her recovery, hoping to get back all that she lost.

Find it: Amazon, Barnes and Noble. The Book Depository, iBooks, Goodreads   

My Review:

If you've followed my blog for awhile, you know that I tend to read books about eating disorders.  The reason for that is because I always feel a little connection.  I am in no way claiming to have an actual eating disorder.  What I am saying is that I can feel the same types of feelings that the characters in these books share.  While I am pretty much able to control myself so that I don't go down those paths, or maybe just my personality doesn't let me go that way, when I read these stories, I feel emotionally for these girls.  I can see how easy it is to slip into the habits and lifestyles that they do.  I'm pretty sure that I, like probably many girls/other people, have a distorted body image.  I remember when I was at what is an ideal weight for my height, and how I still would feel that I had a stomach bulge, something that while I can go look at pictures now and see there wasn't any such thing, I still remember looking in the mirror and seeing it.  Even today when I look at pictures of myself, or catch myself in a mirror, I can see something that I know is not right or maybe I think it looks better than it does when I see myself in a picture.  I don't know, enough about me probably.  Let's just say that I read this type of book because it helps me look in and take a look at what I am thinking.

I feel like this story was very realistic, yet had what a good story can have, a happy, yet realistically happy ending.  All the things that Elizabeth went through were so real.  She didn't go in and just follow all the rules and get better.  She didn't just have a bunch of people around her that were inspiring and perfect.  When other girls may have gotten to leave the clinic, they slipped, they returned, and as they had done before, during and after their time at the clinic, they lied.  So did Elizabeth, even when it seemed she was going to be ready to go back out and try on her own in the real world, she slipped.  But I like that she had real parents in the story.  Parents that made their own mistakes.  They loved her, they were supportive, but didn't necessarily know how to do what needed to be done.  To see that maybe it was something in her family life that maybe helped push her in the direction she went in order to end up where she was.  The fact that even back in her parents' past could also have contributed to this whole situation was also very telling.  While it is so easy to blame the bullies, to blame parents for what they've done, it is always also important to look just at what may be the cause of why they behave the way they do.  Believe me, I am NOT saying any kind of bullying or bad parenting is okay, I'm saying that looking at why those things happen could be exactly what could help in the end.  If those people are willing to help themselves and get better.

I could write a very long review about this.  I guess these days I should probably say something about possible triggers in here for people with eating issues.  But I feel the author did a good job with them.  Didn't gloss over, make them look silly and easy to overcome.  This is another great book to share about this topic.  And the romance in here?  Also a perfect and pretty realistic one for me.  It was not what you thought. Although I did get a little inkling when we first got a clue that it wasn't who Elizabeth had assumed sending the anonymous gifts.  The book touches on social media issues, as well as looks at just how hard it is for not only the person dealing with the issue to talk about it, but also for how hard it is to be a friend and not know how to deal with it.  Great, great story.  Definitely will be purchasing for the school library where I work. 

About the Author:

  Alexandra Ballard has worked as a magazine editor, middle-school English teacher, freelance writer, and cake maker. She holds master's from both Columbia (journalism) and Fordham (education) and spent ten years in the classroom, beginning in the Bronx and ending up in the hills of California. Today she writes full time and lives in the Bay Area with her husband, two daughters, and two dogs. What I Lost is Alexandra's first novel.  


  Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Instagram  









Giveaway:

3 winners will receive a finished copy of WHAT I LOST, US Only
     a Rafflecopter giveaway

Tour Schedule:

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Week One:

5/29/2017-YA and Wine- Interview

5/30/2017- Take Me Away To A Great Read- Review

5/31/2017- BookHounds YA- Guest Post

6/1/2017- Here's to Happy Endings- Review

6/2/2017- Eli to the nth- Excerpt

Week Two:

6/5/2017- Lisa Loves Literature- Review

6/6/2017- YA Book Madness- Guest Post

6/7/2017- The Cover Contessa- Interview

6/8/2017- Book Briefs- Review

6/9/2017- A Gingerly Review- Review

  

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.  

Rage (Riders of the Apocalypse #2) by Jackie Morse Kessler

These are kind of short books, just about 200 pages, and so I decided to fit them in before some books that I had deadlines for.  Plus, I'm planning to go to the Romantic Times Convention the first weekend in May since it will be here in my hometown this year.  And the author will be here, so that is really exciting!  I've been a fan of this author since I read the first book in this series, Hunger.  I think that book was really easy for me to connect to, as I'm sure for many other females because it is about a girl with an eating disorder.  Food/exercising/weight, are all things I've dealt with in my life.  And so it was kind of a familiar struggle to read about.
This second book, Rage, might not be quite so easy to relate to for people.  The main character is Missy.  And she is a cutter.  She cuts because it helps numb or dull the pain.  She felt as the blood ran out of her that it also let out all the hurt and anger she had inside.  But then her boyfriend, Adam, had seen her marks, and he'd called her a freak, and broken up with her.  Which only made her cut more.  But he didn't just break up with her, he told his friends about it, and now at school she had to deal with the boys that called her names and teased her.  But she had what she called her dead face, that she dealt with those people at school.  To ignore them and not let them see her pain.  The story begins on the day she kills her cat.  She doesn't really kill her cat, that freaked me a bit at first.  I was afraid she was violent to animals since the title of the book was rage.  But she had put her cat to sleep, and she felt guilty for it.  That is something I understand because I've had to put two dogs to sleep.  I felt so guilty for the first one, and the second one.  It's such a hard choice to make.  Because could the vet have helped them if you'd spent more time and money?  Or would they have continued suffering?  So the guilt from that also led to Missy cutting more to release the pain.  Well, the day she lost her cat, Death showed up at her door.  It seems as if she had been really close to killing herself with her cutting that day from the description.  He showed up and gave her a big white box.  She didn't want it, was scared, so slammed the door in Death's face and shoved the big box, onto her closet shelf, which for some reason it was now small enough to fit on.
Death is patient, he knows that soon she will decide to take up the sword and become one of the four Riders, she will become War.  And she does, after she decides to go to a party.  She decides to go after her ex tells her he misses her, both in person at school, as well as through texting.  She also has a bad relationship with her younger sister, who is popular, and is not happy having an emo older sister at school.  All these things spur Missy to go to the party.  Where Adam finds her, and kisses her, and brings back all her old feelings for him.  But he's not really back for her, he's back to humiliate her, which he does.  And now she is ready.  She takes the sword and goes back to the party.  Only they can't see her as a rider, but she does what War does, as she walks by she spreads feelings of anger, rage, and war.  Only afterwards Missy is not pleased about it.  She feels horrible for what she's caused.  And it is this war between herself and what she believes to be "War" that she must fight and decide how will she take up the reins.  Famine, from the first book shows up several times.  Both to prod her into taking the job, as well as to kind of help her become a Rider that will help balance the four.  But Famine is cautious, as the one before her was killed by War, and she was almost killed herself before she had to kill the War before Missy.
And there is a bit of a romantic feeling between Death and Missy, as it would make sense that Death and War would go together.
We also get to meet Pestilence in this book, and he is sick, as you might figure he would be.  But the meeting with him I believe is a good bridge to the next book in the series, as the death of War in the first book brought us to this book.
Such a great series.  The issues tackled that lead to the Riders of the Apocalypse are so real and so pertinent to many teens these days.  As a teacher, I have known kids who cut.  I have heard girls that were as skinny as can be talk about needing to diet and lose weight.  All of these things make me sad.  The food things have always been understandable to me.  And with some depression issues I've had, I've recently begun to understand about the cutting as well.  Not something I'd ever do, I hate pain, pass out when I get shots or give blood, but I can understand the need to not feel pain, and how that could be a way to take your mind off emotional pain.  And I love how at the end of the book the author states that a portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to To Write Love On Her Arms, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people struggling with this issue of self-injury, as well as other similar issues.  If you want more info about  this organization, you can go to their website:  TWLOHA.

Gateway 1: Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

This was my first read for the 2011-2012 Gateway Award Possible Nominees. The title didn't give me any idea what it was going to be about. However, I should have known from reading Speak by this same author that this would be a very deep story. This was a VERY hard book to read. Yes, when I was a teen I read books like Go Ask Alice about drug use, and I read a biography of Karen Carpenter and her eating disorder. However, as with Speak, I felt a very personal connection to this one, and I'm sure that's what made it so hard. In Speak, I also had an experience like the main character. In Wintergirls, many of our main character Lia's thoughts are ones I've had myself. Now, Lia has an eating disorder, she's anorexic, and she cuts. Neither of which are things I do. However, the body image, the hateful things she says about herself in her mind, those are things I do to myself. At one point, she says she wishes she could throw up. I admit, I've wished I could be bulimic, because they can eat whatever they want, but then get rid of it. Yeah, yeah, I know it's bad, and that's why I'd never do it, but the fact is that it has crossed my mind.

Lia's best friend growing up, Cassie, has just been found dead in a motel room by herself. Cassie and Lia had grown apart over the past few years. Cassie's parents felt that Lia wasn't a good role model after she'd been put into a clinic to help get over her past anorexic episodes. One of them was a car accident where Lia passed out from low blood sugar, and Cassie was in the car. We do learn that Cassie was bulimic, and into alcohol and drugs. So not quite the angel her parents believed.

We hear all of Lia's thoughts, we hear the ways she figures out to try to keep at the weight she wants instead of where her doctor wants her to be. Very hard read, but a good one.