But on August 8, everything changes, and Autumn has to rely on all her strength to move on.

In the summer after graduation, Autumn and Finny reconnect and are finally ready to be more than friends. Growing up, Autumn and Finny were like peas in a pod despite their differences: Autumn is “quirky and odd,” while Finny is “sweet and shy and everyone like him.” But in eighth grade, Autumn and Finny stop being friends due to an unexpected kiss. They drift apart and find new friends, but their friendship keeps asserting itself at parties, shared holiday gatherings and random encounters. The finely drawn characters capture readers’ attention in this debut.Īutumn and Phineas, nicknamed Finny, were born a week apart their mothers are still best friends. Jennifer is relieved midway through the book, for example, to have a new roommate who understands how much she misses a dog she's barely mentioned in the preceding pages.ĭespite occasional unevenness, a powerful story of healing and self-acceptance. Some storylines begin or end abruptly, however, and some details come seemingly out of nowhere. The 1980s setting is vividly realized, clear not only from the dates in each chapter heading, but from well-chosen details-the cigarette-smoke–filled EDU lounge, the pop-music enthusiasm Jennifer shares with her favorite nurse, Chuck. Treatment-plan documents appear interspersed with the text, which begins as a verse novel and abruptly shifts into prose-and from a third- to a first-person narrator-when Jennifer enters her second of three treatment stages.

Immediately, Jennifer is thrust into a world of humiliating suspicion (a particularly nasty nurse is certain that Jennifer is manipulating her weigh-in results), complex social hierarchies (as a bulimarexic, Jennifer falls somewhere between anorexics and overeaters), and regimented treatment. Though skeptical, her mother assents, and soon Jennifer is a resident in the Eating Disorders Unit at the Samuel Tuke Center. The story begins when Jennifer asks her parents to take her to the hospital.

In an autobiographical novel, Jennifer spends two months at a mental hospital in Syracuse, New York, undergoing treatment for her eating disorder.

Believarexic