Before We Were Blue

August 1, 2021

Gr 8 Up-Set in a facility for girls with eating disorders, the story unfolds from two perspectives. Shoshana is a Jewish girl who has a passion for cheerleading. Her team is going for a world championship in cheer and not only that, the team is the subject of a reality show that follows the girls from the gym to the competitions. Her parents are very supportive of her choices, but when she stopped eating, they sought professional help. Rowan has been in and out of treatment centers over several years and tries to play the system in her efforts not to eat. She has a dysfunctional relationship with her single mother and claims that it was her mother who taught her unhealthy eating habits. The two teens become fast friends, but Rowan does not know about the reality show and the hundreds of thousands of followers that Shoshana has on social media. The two try to escape the facility, and when that fails, the friendship becomes extremely rocky. The nurses and therapists are portrayed in a mostly positive light, and treatment is shown to be a process not a quick fix. VERDICT This will be popular with readers who like to read about teens having to combat great personal challenges.-Elizabeth Kahn, Patrick F. Taylor Science & Technology Academy, Avondale, LA

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August 15, 2021
The lives of two 17-year-old girls, burdened by secrets, collide in an eating disorder clinic. Shoshana, the good girl, is a champion cheerleader from a seemingly stable and wealthy suburban home. Rowan, the wild child, is fleeing her struggling single mother's emotional manipulation and neglect and fighting to forget a violation she doesn't yet understand. Both girls are carrying wounds that they keep from each other, the adults around them, and even themselves. As they struggle with their own past experiences of trauma, self-harm, and family pressures, they fall into an intense and obsessive friendship as a way to manage and control both their own demons and each other. Will they find it in themselves to heal and move forward? Do they even want to? The book gracefully wrestles with these questions as the story unfurls in alternating chapters that move between Shoshana's and Rowan's points of view. This call-and-response structure allows for a gradual reveal of each girl's past and present in a way that both builds suspense and feels like the growth of intimacy in friendship and love as well as the therapeutic encounter they are experiencing in the clinic. Both girls, as well as most supporting characters, default to White. The book balances tensions of class, antisemitism, and sexuality in complex and compassionate ways. A gut-wrenching and cathartic page-turner about identity, desire, and the strength it takes to heal. (Fiction. 14-18)

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