Kirkus Review

Anorexia nervosa, the trendy, sometimes fatal mental illness partial to well-off teenage girls--in a haft-heartedly fictionalized but morbidly intriguing case history. Bright, pleasant Francesca Dietrich is 5'4"" and 98 pounds when we first meet her, but over the following weeks, obsessed with being too fat, she loses almost another 30 pounds. Her affluent, neurotic Manhattan parents become increasingly panicky. Her period stops. Hair grows on her stomach. Her doctor and parents order her to eat. But an increasingly fearful and fierce Francesca (or ""Kessa,"" as she calls herself in less-than-convincing interior monologues) clings to such rituals as dividing food into tiny fractions, eating almost nothing, forcing herself to vomit. Enter bearded, chummy psychologist Sandy Sherman, who coaxes Kessa--who's now hospitalized and receiving intravenous feeding--into sharing her rituals with him; and soon, with help from some all-family therapy, Kessa's unconscious motivations emerge: sibling rivalry, feeling unloved, craving attention (""Gregg got admiration and Susanna got attention and I got nothing""). That is, in fact, the general sort of diagnosis in anorexia cases, but here it comes a bit too easily, promises a bit too zippy a cure, and certainly doesn't furnish the eye-opening epiphany required for gripping psycho-drama. Still, Sandy is one of the more believable and reassuring fictional therapists in recent fiction, and there's enough quiet authenticity here to reward those readers interested in the disease but not interested enough to dip into Hilde Bruch's thorough, fascinating non-fiction study, The Golden Cage (p. 29). Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.