Setting the Bar

After a Church vote, 16 year old Olivia and her family are uprooted from her home and forced to move after her father loses his job as a minister in a small, Ohio town. Olivia, her much younger and oddly named sister (Callapher), her mother and father opt to relocate to West Virginia and the Appalachian Mountains. When they get there, the family rents a home from their Aunt Margaret and her friend Ruby, who are affectionately known around town as the Old Maids. Olivia feels that the suffering in her and her family’s life shows that God really doesn’t exist and, if He or She does, they don’t really care because if they did, they wouldn’t have made their lives so awful. Olivia spends her days mentally calculating calories and fat grams, ignoring the hunger in her body and ignoring the fact that she’s wasting away and is anorexic. Olivia’s parents are too consumed by their own problems, rendering them unable to help her even though they realize that something awful and drastic is happening to her.

This first novel is about struggle. It’s about the struggle to accept oneself and ones own beauty and flaws and to love oneself in spite of any perceived imperfection. It’s specifically about how women struggle with body image and eating disorders and how it becomes about control in a world that seems to be descending into an uncontrollable frenzy. But even though there’s a fair amount of gloom and doom in the pages, there are also glimmers - hope, love, faith are there for Olivia too in spite of her struggle with a disorder that no one wants to admit she has, not even Olivia herself. Olivia has a new beginning, which is also what this novel is about, and somehow manages to overcome her disorder with help, counseling and, of course, Jesus Christ.

Generally, this was a pretty good book. The descriptions of the obsessions with food were very true to form and I thought that the development of the characters was also really, really good.  This was a good first novel.

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