Skinny

From Goodreads:

Find your voice.

Hopeless. Freak. Elephant. Pitiful. These are the words of Skinny, the vicious voice that lives inside fifteen-year-old Ever Davies’s head. Skinny tells Ever all the dark thoughts her classmates have about her. Ever knows she weighs over three hundred pounds, knows she’ll probably never be loved, and Skinny makes sure she never forgets it. 
But there is another voice: Ever’s singing voice, which is beautiful but has been silenced by Skinny. Partly in the hopes of trying out for the school musical—and partly to try and save her own life—Ever decides to undergo a risky surgery that may help her lose weight and start over.
With the support of her best friend, Ever begins the uphill battle toward change. But demons, she finds, are not so easy to shake, not even as she sheds pounds. Because Skinny is still around. And Ever will have to confront that voice before she can truly find her own.

Every girl person can related to Ever, regardless of whether or not s/he has struggled with weight and/or body image issues. We all have a nagging, cruel and critical Skinny voice in our heads, although some of us do a better job of silencing or ignoring it. That's what makes this well-written, fast-paced issue book universal.

It's hard to spend a lot of time inside Ever's head, but light doses of humor help. Witnessing Ever's struggle to overcome her self-esteem and weight issues was heartbreaking, but that made her progress all the more powerful--especially when she realized that she had always been her worst critic.What a powerful message to teen girls; it reminded me of the famous Eleanor Roosevelt quote, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

I'm not sure I'm wild about the cover--for a story so focused on the protagonist's appearance, I might have preferred a more abstract image instead of a model. However, the design does a fantastic job of depicting Ever's interiority--"Skinny," who is almost a character in her own right--and that is extremely hard to do!

Skinny will be published by Scholastic in October 2012.

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