The Stone Girl by Alyssa B. Sheinmel

Good Reads Summary

The Stone Girl by Alyssa B. Sheinmel

She feels like a creature out of a fairy tale; a girl who discovers that her bones are really made out of stone, that her skin is really as thin as glass, that her hair is brittle as straw, that her tears have dried up so that she cries only salt. Maybe that's why it doesn't hurt when she presses hard enough to begin bleeding: it doesn't hurt, because she's not real anymore.

Sethie Weiss is hungry, a mean, angry kind of hunger that feels like a piece of glass in her belly. She’s managed to get down to 111 pounds and knows that with a little more hard work—a few more meals skipped, a few more snacks vomited away—she can force the number on the scale even lower. She will work on her body the same way she worked to get her perfect grades, to finish her college applications early, to get her first kiss from Shaw, the boy she loves, the boy who isn’t quite her boyfriend.

Sethie will not allow herself one slip, not one bad day, not one break in concentration. Her body is there for her to work on when everything and everyone else—her best friend, her schoolwork, and Shaw—are gone.

From critically acclaimed writer Alyssa B. Sheinmel comes an unflinching and unparalleled portrayal of one girl’s withdrawal, until she is sinking like a stone into her own illness, her own loneliness—her own self.

My Thoughts
My rating: 2 of 5 stars


See if I started this with an ‘Isa didn’t get this book’ then proceeded to say ‘Isa this,’ ‘Isa that…’ the same the Stone Girl progressed with its ‘Sethie this and Sethie that,’ well, I’d likely drive you batty. That is if you’ve an issue with third person which I didn’t realize that I had an issue with myself.

It felt clunky and clumsy at times with the all the telling going on. And if that’s not bad enough, the POV effectively distanced the girl from me. It kept me from feeling more sympathetic to what she was feeling. Though she did have me confused by how blind she could be with a certain someone.

The ending too left me feeling cold. I felt it oversimplified matters. That all that she’d been going through felt reactionary. That suddenly there’s an amping up of what she was doing, feeling, experiencing came into focus after Shaw. I mean what about prior to that? How did Janey put i? That the way she was, was not a normal reaction versus healthy one? This felt like it was discounting everything Sethie had been saying even prior to it. I mean somehow Sethie recognized there was something wrong; she just didn’t have a name to put to it. Why make it a mere reaction to a break up when something was wrong the word go.

Thanks Netgalley!

2/5


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