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Weekend Picks for June 13th

6/13/2025

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Welcome to our second Friday in June, which means our second June Weekend Picks brought to us again by Professor Kia Jane Richmond!
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Kia Jane Richmond
Dr. Kia Jane Richmond is Professor and Director of English Education at Northern Michigan University and author of Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature: Real Struggles through Fictional Characters (Bloomsbury, 2019). She is a frequent presenter at NCTE, ELATE, ALAN, CEL, and MCTE conferences and has published many articles and book chapters focused on young adult literature and teacher preparation in English Language Arts.

​She can be reached at [email protected].

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

​Published by Viking (Penguin Group) in 2009. 
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​​Lia Overbrook is an 18-year-old high school student who lives with anorexia nervosa. She is unable to see her body in ways that are healthy. Instead, Lia feels repulsive and frail, which will not help her reach her (unrealistic) goal weight of 80 pounds. Like many young people with eating disorders, Lia finds ways to lie about her eating habits to her family, over-exercises and weighs herself repeatedly– both in secret, and doom scrolls online in chat rooms and underground blogs filled with the voices of others who are seeking solace and advice for weight-loss. Those voices are loud in Lia’s head, bumping into the voices of her parents (who are constantly fighting) and her best friend Cassie Parrish (who has lived with bulimia since she was 10 years old), and the buzzing of “echovoices that made a permanent home inside the eggshell of her skull,” saying
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":: Stupid/ugly/stupid/bitch/stupid/fat/stupid/baby/stupid/loser/stupid/lost/::” 
Their friendship started with sleepovers and bike rides, but became a toxic relationship as Cassie and Lia began a dangerous game of weight-loss and dieting to see who could be the thinnest: they view themselves as “wintergirls frozen in matchstick bodies.” Cassie becomes obsessed with being thinner than Lia, until at one point, after Lia is released from the hospital after being treated for her eating disorder, Cassie lashes out, calls Lia a “toxic shadow,” blames Lia for her plummeting grades and poor choices, and cuts Lia out of her life. That is, until Cassie calls her 33 times the night she died. Lia didn’t answer, and much of the novel is focused on Lia’s experiences with Cassie’s ghost, who relentlessly taunts Lia about her weight, her body, and her choices.
What makes this book so powerful is Anderson’s vivid imagery and her use of flashbacks to help readers connect to Lia’s experiences with anorexia nervosa and self-injury. We feel Lia’s pain – physical and emotional – as she fights herself, her mental illness, and her memories of Cassie. 
Anderson shares accurate material about Lia’s treatments including talk therapy, medication, and hospitalization. On her website: (https://madwomanintheforest.com/book/wintergirls/), the author includes discussion questions, facts about eating disorders, activities and projects, and an interview about her own experiences while writing the book.
​Laurie Halse Anderson, a New York Times bestselling author and phenomenal speaker, has won numerous awards for her writing, including the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (2023), the NCTE Intellectual Freedom Award (2015), and the ALA’s Margaret A. Edwards Award (2009). Her most recent novel, just published this year, is Rebellion 1776, a middle grade historical narrative about a young girl living through an epidemic during the Revolutionary War. 
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Kia Jane Richmond with Laurie Halse Anderson in 2018 at Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature (Las Vegas).
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    Editor/Curator:

    Our current Weekend Picks editor/curator is Dr. Amanda Stearns-Pfeiffer. She is an Associate Professor of English Education at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan where she has taught courses in ELA methods, YA Literature, grammar, and Contemporary Literature since 2013. When she's not teaching, writing, or reading, she loves to spend time with her husband and three kids - especially on the tennis court. Her current research interests include YAL featuring girls in sports and investigating the representation of those female athletes. ​​

    Questions? Comments? Contact Amanda:
    [email protected]

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