Who should show up there, too, but Ashley Barnum, the prettiest, most together girl in class. As the novel opens, Isabelle's little sister, April, has told their mother about Isabelle's problem. The climax of the story occurs when the main character realizes that group therapy has helped her to. Isabelle tries to make light of this, but the underlying tension is expressed in overeating and then binging. The book Perfect by Natasha Friend deals with a young girls struggle with an eating disorder. Her mother, who used to take care of herself, now wears only lumpy, ill-fitting clothes, cries all night, and has taken every picture of her dead husband and put them under her bed. Since the death of her father, Isabelle's family has only functioned on the surface. Isabelle describes the scene at school with bemused accuracy-the self-important (but really not bad) English teacher, the boy that is constantly fixated on Ashley Barnum, the prettiest girl in class, and the dynamics of the lunchroom, where tables are turf in a all-eyes-open awareness of everybody's relative social position.īut everything is not normal, really. Depicting with humor and insight the pressure to be outwardly perfect, this novel for ages 10-13 shows how one girl develops compassion for her own and others’ imperfections.įor 13-year-old Isabelle Lee, whose father has recently died, everything's normal on the outside.
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