Thin Girls

January 1, 2020

In this debut from Roxane Gay protégée Clarke, entwined twins Rose and Lily can even sense each other's feelings, often in opposing-reaction ways. When teenage Rose starts dieting obsessively (ending up hospitalized for anorexia in adulthood), Lily eats more, then gets involved with a dangerous cult-diet group from which Rose must rescue her. With a 35,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 20, 2020
Clarke’s raw debut explores the ravages of eating disorders and extreme dieting on identical twins Rose and Lily. As the twins enter high school in the mid-2000s, Rose tries to fit in with a group of popular girls who pressure each other to commit to an apple-a-day regimen. Lily is ostracized from the group and turns to overeating while her sister starves herself. Rose, now 24, narrates from inside the walls of treatment center for eating disorders, detailing the twins’ lives leading up to that point in sections headed by year, age, and weight, and highlighting Rose’s growing insecurity in relation to her sister (“I was her stunt double.... People looked at me and saw almost-Lily”). After Rose is discharged and assigned to live with Lily for a probationary period, it’s Rose who feels the need to offer support: Lily is in a relationship with the husband of a lifestyle guru and subjecting herself to a diet consisting of zero-calorie bars, and her life seems to be falling apart despite her excitement over her weight loss. While Clarke’s prose slips occasionally into pedestrian observations, the sisters’ bond is strongly palpable. This page-turner makes for an illuminating, ultimately hopeful look at the constant struggle women face regarding their body image. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House.

May 1, 2020
In this debut novel from Kiwi author Clarke, readers meet identical twins Lily and Rose. Throughout childhood, the pair shared emotions and sensations: Lily could taste Rose's excitement, could smell her rage, could feel her sister's every worry in her own heart. In late adolescence, Rose developed a serious eating disorder, which required in-patient treatment, and was sequestered indefinitely to a rehabilitation facility. While Rose was withering away in their teenage years, Lily was gaining weight rapidly.The physical differences between the formerly co-dependent twins became striking, but they grew apart emotionally as well. The twins' family was consumed by Rose's struggle with anorexia, but didn't give much thought to Lily's rapid weight gain. It's not until the present, when Lily is dating an abusive married man, that Rose must assume the role of care-taking twin. While grappling with the deaths of friends she met in treatment, Rose has to swoop in and solve her twin's less visible but equally lethal problem. The novel is a breathtaking and sobering account of eating disorder treatment and mortality.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 15, 2020
A first-time novelist explores the abuse women inflict on themselves, the abuse others inflict upon them, and the intersection of the two. When they were small, Lily and Rose were essentially indistinguishable--even to themselves. As they approached adolescence, though, Lily, the outgoing, people-pleasing twin, had become everyone's favorite while obstinate, awkward Rose became her sister's shadow. Their relationship to each other changed again when Rose discovered a talent for enduring the fad diets imposed by the leader of their clique. As Rose stops eating altogether, Lily starts eating more and more. Rose recounts this history as she embarks on her second year in a clinic where she is supposed to be recovering from anorexia but is really consuming just enough calories to avoid force-feeding. She likes the comforting routine of the clinic and the company of other "thin girls." It's only when Rose realizes that Lily is in a dangerously abusive relationship that she becomes determined to return to the outside world. Rose is a strange and prickly character, constantly interrupting her narration with bits of trivia from the random assortment of books available at the clinic. She is both truthful and wily, and her powers of insight are prodigious--except when she's analyzing herself. It takes her a very long time, for example, to discover that her efforts to shrink her body down to nothingness are related to her unwillingness to accept her own sexuality. The story she tells is as gripping as a thriller, but it's Clarke's language that truly makes this novel special. She writes with a lyricism that not only encompasses the grotesque and the transcendent, but also sometimes commingles the two. When Rose finds a collection of short fiction Lily has written, these harrowing little fables bring the latent otherworldliness of the novel as a whole to the surface. Incisive social commentary rendered in artful, original, and powerfully affecting prose.

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June 1, 2020

In this debut from Roxane Gay prot�g�e Clarke, entwined twins Rose and Lily can even sense each other's feelings, often in opposing-reaction ways. When teenage Rose starts dieting obsessively (ending up hospitalized for anorexia in adulthood), Lily eats more, then gets involved with a dangerous cult-diet group from which Rose must rescue her. With a 35,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.