Dancing with ana

I am not the target audience for this book but Nicole Barker took me back to high school. Showed me the insecurities and desire to be one of the popular kids. Beth figured she had found out why she and her friends were not popular. They were fatter than the most popular girl. Do not fret, she had the answer too.

Diet & exercise.

Beth and her friends had me wanting to shake some sense into them. None of them were overly "fat", they just weren't model thin. The book reads so well it was real to me and it scared me that our girls are going through this.

Then there's Beth best friend, Jeremy, and "He was looking at her in a way she'd never seen before...." Growing up is never easy.

This was a quick read. A slice of life that doesn't cover more than a school year but we aged years waiting for the girls to discover a healthy life.

F.Y.I. I received this book free of charge in exchange for an honest review ( )

Reviewed by Jaglvr for TeensReadToo.com

Beth and her friends decide to band together to help each other lose a few pounds. It starts out sensibly.

Beth does research and bases their goal weights on charts and heights. Her friends all start out well, but within a matter of weeks, they all realize that they don't need to lose weight or are comfortable with who they are. But Beth has her goal weight in her sights, and she decides to continue on her quest to lose the desired pounds.

Beth starts to date her longtime neighbor, Jeremy, and things are going well with that. But before long, Beth finds she's still not happy with her weight and starts to hide her eating habits from both her mom and Jeremy. She gets lightheaded more often, and things get serious when she passes out on the track at school.

Beth has to come to grips with things that have happened in her life that she had no control over before she can gain control over herself and her weight.

DANCING WITH ANA is a good book for anyone struggling with self-image issues. It shows how a seemingly little thing like losing a few pounds can grow out of control. ( )

This book is about a very real problem among teen girls today. It shows how easy it can be to get to the point of being anorexic. I loved that the friends were so close and looked out for each other. There is so much packed into this short book, and is so well written I felt like I was a bystander, watching things unfold. The only down side I found was the timeline of the events. The book is only 170 pages long and I read it just a few hours. I would recommend this book, it was very good. ( )

In sunny Florida, where more skin is bared than not, appearances are constantly evaluated, especially by the young. Among those doing the evaluating is Beth Baxter, a smart, pretty and confident high school student who is falling in love with her neighbour, Jeremy Duscana. She seems like she should have it all together, and that makes her descent into weight-loss obsession more intriguing to follow in “Dancing With Ana“.

One day over lunch, Beth and her closest girlfriends – Rachel, Melanie and Jenny – discuss the school’s It girl, Christine McCady. Popular, rich, and thin, Christine seems to be someone the girls ought to emulate, and so they agree to join in together on a diet to lose weight. Of course, Christine only serves as the superficial catalyst for their individual decisions, and the story delves into several of the body-image issues confronting the girls, particularly as it relates to the divorce of Beth’s parents, and Rachel’s terrible home life.

Without getting into minor spoilers, the book handles issues from the viewpoint of the teenage girls well, in that their actions make sense based on how they are looking at their problems and what they want to achieve at the time. The book lays out how these events could plausibly unfold, and this is why I’d recommend the book to younger aged girls, their parents, educators, coaches, and others who interact with young girls.

Also, the dialogue and reactions, based on how I’ve overheard nieces and nephews, seem to be on-target, and if anything, slightly less sarcastic and cynical, although Billy comes pretty close in those departments.

Speaking of Billy, this brings me to my main reservation about the book, and it has to deal with the male characters. The teenage boys all have amazing bodies, while any man that has more than a passing mention is either an aspiring rapist or a neglectful walkout. Certainly there are plenty of all of those in the world, but the choice to have essentially no positive male figure over the age of 18 sticks out. It feels especially pronounced in contrast to the thoughtful and careful presentation of Beth and her friends. Granted, there are limited adult characters in the book as it is, but something as simple as having Jeremy’s father, instead of his mother, pointing out to him the absence of Noel Baxter from Beth’s life may have been a good way to resolve the absence of positive male role models, and would have augured well for Beth and Jeremy’s relationship.

There are various romantic subplots, and although convenient in how the story wraps up in that respect for the girls, I won’t hold that against the story, and instead consider it a happy, youthful joy amid the wreckage strewn in Beth’s life during the aftermath of her parents divorce, and as rewards for Rachel, Jenny and Melanie. Likewise, the other subplots are serviceable as well, and wrap up definitively.

Finally, there are parts of the book where the author writes about despair and a desire for change in a way that can be understood across generations, and for me those are the strongest parts of the book. I used one such passage as part of an ongoing blog event called “Teaser Tuesdays” earlier this week:

“She felt like she didn’t know how to talk to people anymore, she’d forgotten their language. She was living in slow motion, while everyone else seemed sped up, living their lives.”
- p. 131

The comments from that post reflected that people found in that writing a sentiment that was meaningful yet easy to grasp, just as I did. The passages like this lead me to determine that, although I have some reservations about this book, there is evidence of dedicated craft at work in “Dancing With Ana“, and I consider it to be overall a good book.

Beth is a lucky girl…

She comes from a loving family. She has three best friends. She loves to surf and lives five minutes from the beach. She also recently discovered that the boy she’s grown up with has the most amazing green eyes…

Beth has every reason to smile. Every reason to be happy. Every reason to feel blessed.

Then why is she sticking her fingers down her throat?

My review: As you can tell from the synopsis, this book is dealing with anorexia, I felt the author did a good job of showing how the compulsion starts, with the need for control. As Beth feels her life spiraling further and further out of control she decides if she can just lose 10 pounds her life will be better. Even with the love of her boyfriend and the support of her friends she soon finds that the diet is no longer a way to lose weight but a way to control her life, an obsession.

I felt the ending of this a little too pat, those of us who have experienced obsessive compulsive disorder know there are no pat solutions to it. However, I appreciated the way the author stressed the importance of family and friend support and how she showed it depended on Beth to overcome her obsession. How the fact that her friends would be there for her no matter what was a fact she had to come to realize by herself.

I would recommend this book for teens and their parents ( )