Release Date: October 1st 2012
Published By: Point
Pages: 272
Goodreads: Add it to your reading list

Rating: 3 out of 5

Synopsis: Find your voice.

Hopeless. Freak. Elephant. Pitiful. These are the words of Skinny, the vicious voice that lives inside fifteen-year-old Ever Davies’s head. Skinny tells Ever all the dark thoughts her classmates have about her. Ever knows she weighs over three hundred pounds, knows she’ll probably never be loved, and Skinny makes sure she never forgets it.

But there is another voice: Ever’s singing voice, which is beautiful but has been silenced by Skinny. Partly in the hopes of trying out for the school musical—and partly to try and save her own life—Ever decides to undergo a risky surgery that may help her lose weight and start over.

With the support of her best friend, Ever begins the uphill battle toward change. But demons, she finds, are not so easy to shake, not even as she sheds pounds. Because Skinny is still around. And Ever will have to confront that voice before she can truly find her own.

Review: Skinny hit home with me when I was reading it - I feel like everyone has that inner voice that tells them that they aren’t good enough at times. Some have that more than others. For me on a personal level it’s always been weight related as I struggled with this immensely through my teenage and adult years. So reading this teenage perspective of being overweight in high school was something that struck a chord with me.

I feel like a lot of what Ever had to go through is what many people overweight battle with. It’s easy enough to know the nutrition side of things, but Skinny addresses what most of us battle with, and that is the emotional and mental side of being overweight which I haven’t come across in any other YA book I have read. I could agree with a lot of what Ever went through, and empathise with how she would have felt in many of the situations she was put in. I wasn’t surprised to hear an interview with Donna Cooner after I finished the book and she explained that a lot of this book was based on experiences she has had a first hand account with. It reads that way too, almost like a personal journey.

It was inspiring to see the transformation in Ever, both physically, but more importantly mentally. The more progress she made, the more ‘skinny’ was losing her power over Ever. That voice in her head was going away slowly until she was mentally strong enough to face her for once and for all. I loved seeing this transformation happening both internally and externally!

I think this is an important book for people to read, not only to understand what it’s like on the other side of obesity, but also, because I don’t really think it matters if you are overweight or not, but everyone has some type of complex or insecurity, and I feel like the message of this book is pretty universal and can apply to many different situations.

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