I read "Snow Angel Perfect," an abbreviated and incomplete version of "After the Strawberry," a free download for my Kindle. The topic, anorexia, is important. However, the characters in the book were not likeable/appealing, and the main character enlisted no feelings from me. Her parents were "losers." The story did not capture me and the writing was stiff & stilted. It seemed that approximately 75% of the sentences were of the version: subject/predicate with a few modifiers thrown in. I really should give it only 1 star but perhaps the full book is better. This book makes the interior world of a young woman struggling with an eating disorder completely comprehensible. Like all good books, it carries the reader into a brand new universe and changes the way everything looks and feels afterward. Now I find myself seeing food through the protagonist's eyes. For her eating and not-eating have taken on symbolic meanings far beyond the physical. As the author's vivid and compassionate descriptions illuminate the protagonist's interior landscape, the reader also comes to a new realization not only of this world, but of the way we each compose layers of symbolic meaning over our experience, and act out emotions through the body. The greatest conflict in the book comes when this girl's mode of psychological survival threatens to actually kill her. The writing is gorgeous and there's lots more here -- about the ethical conflicts that come with being an artist, about how the swirling tensions in a family can manifest themselves in one girl's disordered behavior, in how mysterious change and cure really are. I highly recommend this book.
What do You think about After The Strawberry (2009)?
Jesse was such a horrible character that the whole book was ruined for me. Ugh.
—Wendy007
