Aly's Reviews > Skinny

** spoiler alert ** This book was very raw and realistic and sad. We get to see this story through two different points of views, and at first I wasn’t sure how to feel about this but in the end I found it interesting to see the illness from Holly’s point of view.

Giselle is an incredibly intelligent med student who suffers from anorexia, as you read along you start to see that it seems that she also suffers from Dissociative identity disorder(multiple personality) one part of her wants to be healthy, understands that she is very sick and that she could be very well be killing herself. Then there is the part of her that eggs on the starvation or the purging, it’s as if she has these two halves of herself battling for dominance in her mind and the half that doesn’t want her to eat always wins.

We also get to see the poor relationship she had with her father whom she blames for her self-destructive behavior and the sudden news that her mother had an affair, that her father was the other man and that because of this her paternity is in question.

We get to see Holly, the somewhat golden child fourteen year old sister who despite certain adversities is a star athlete, we hear through Holly’s voice how Giselle’s disease affects her and her family.

The writing in this book is brilliant,gorgeous.Ibi Kaslik has got this amazing way with words and that is what I like most about the book, it’s very vivid.

However it is the characters that disappointed me, I felt absolutely and completely detached to the characters by the end of the book. To me the characters were indispensable, easily replaced. You want your readers to either love or hate your characters, the emotional attachment from the reader to your character should be a strong one whether positive or negative.

I also thought that Holly’s inner monologue was much too grown up for her, the heavy prose in her chapters made Holly seem wise beyond her years,it was a bit too much, I find the character could have maybe been more relatable without it.

There seems to be no concept of time within this book either and that bothered me, I have no idea how long it was between the first chapter when Giselle is in the hospital to the last when it’s her funeral. I’ve got no idea how long she dated her boyfriend for nothing.

The last thing was I thought this book brought up too many things that weren’t necessary. I found no point and really didn’t like it at all that Sol(Giselle’s twentysomething year old boyfriend) had a thing for Holly and tried to act on it. I don’t think it did anything for the story, it was unimportant.


While the book itself is very powerful and beautifully written a book needs characters strike out at the reader and they didn't to me.I wanted to love this book but I couldn't.