Review: Skin

Title: Skin
Author: Adrienne Maria Vrettos
Publication Date: March 21st, 2006

Summary:
You don't have to be thin to feel small.

Donnie's life is unraveling. His parents' marriage is falling apart, and his sister is slowly slipping away in the grip of her illness. To top it all off, he accidentally starts a rumor at school that hurts someone he cares about and leaves him an outcast.

So Donnie does the only thing he knows how to do: He tries to fix things, to make everything the way it was before. Before his parents stopped loving each other, before his sister disappeared, before he was alone. But some things are beyond repair, and it will take all Donnie's strength to stop looking back and start moving forward again.


Review:
As I said in my post earlier in the week, when I started reading this book, I realized that I had read it before. I don't usually forget about books I've read, so this was kind of weird to me. As I kept reading though, I remembered that I absolutely loved this book the first time I read it. And I still do now. I really like how it's about such an interesting subject, eating disorders, but it's from the viewpoint of someone close to the person with the disorder. The book starts out with the climax, and then goes back and tells the story of everything leading up to that point, and then after. I like how that worked. One thing that kind of bothered me the more I thought about it, was that there seemed to be a lot of big things happening at once. The story was mostly about Karen's anorexia and how it affected the family and her best friend, but then there were other big things happening such as their father leaving, Donnie getting constant ear infections, and losing both of his best friends/having to cope with being totally alone, while dealing with his sister's problems and the other problems in the family. So sometimes it seemed to me like there was too much going on, but by the end of the book I realized that it didn't really bother me that much because it all kind of fit together. I feel like the parents over-reacted sometimes, like when their father kicked in Karen's door because the mother said that she was too skinny and he HAD to see her. I was thinking, you just noticed that she was that skinny when you went in her room for a minute? What about before that, the rest of that day/week? Why bust down the door? It didn't really make sense to me. But I suppose there are some people/families like that. That's kind of scary to think about.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading Skin. If you enjoy books about dysfunctional families and/or eating disorders, you'll probably like it too :)

Characters: 9/10
Plot: 9/10
Originality: 9/10
Writing: 9/10
Overall grade: A