“Tʜᴇʏ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ɴᴏ ᴄᴀʟᴏʀɪᴇs, ᴛʜᴏᴜɢʜᴛs, ɪᴅᴇᴀs, ᴍᴇᴍᴏʀɪᴇs, ᴀɴᴅ ʏᴏᴜ ᴄᴀɴ sᴛᴏʀᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ɪɴ ʏᴏᴜʀ sᴛᴏᴍᴀᴄʜ.”

Rose and Lily Winters are twins, once inseparable, sharing a frequency ‘that sounded like nothing more than static to others’ until Lily begins to reach for a sun that doesn’t include Rose, longing to be her own person. Rose, no longer a child, is living in a rehabilitation facility for anorexia and managing to still keep Lily tethered to her with her all consuming need. Lily fills herself up with food, nourishment her twin refuses, serving as a distorted mirror. One sister stopped eating, the other started. Both sisters have disorderly eating, but how did they get here? It begins with Rose’s awkwardness and the treason of Lily’s popularity, her quest to refuse the fusion (complete twinship) that Rose needs to feel real. For Lily walks in the light- the smarter, cooler, more outspoken, friendlier twin and Rose is happy to be a creature living in her shadow, so long as she is always along for the ride. Lily loves Rose, but she longs to be different, she hungers to be more than a twin, to have something that is hers alone. When Jemima “Mim” Gates befriends Lily in their youth she is a threat and Rose won’t let her come between them with her popular clique, until Rose learns the fashion of being thin and changes everything.

Through the years, Rose buries secrets she won’t confront within herself by denying her body vital sustenance, a form of self-punishment, though she won’t understand that for a long time to come. Her parent’s marriage crumbles, full of self-denials, and both have tuned out. As the girls come of age, their unhealthy twinship sends them spinning in adulthood. Lily teaches kindergarten when she isn’t fretting over her sister’s health, trying to eat for the two of them, helpless to do anything more. When she falls in love with a married man named Phil, who urges her to put distance between she and Rose, pointing out how disturbingly tangled (co-dependent) they are, Rose is terrified of losing Lily. Worse, he is controlling her- how dare he think he can come between them? Lily is the only family she really has, since their father has fallen apart and their mother has a whole new life. Phil cannot ‘guide’ Lily with Rose’s voice always in her head. It’s for Lily’s own good that he drive a wedge between them.

Lily is done with over-eating, she is yet again abruptly changing her direction in life, throwing Rose’s world into chaos. Phil thinks she looks good now that she is losing weight, and according to Lily, he is just the motivation she needs. Then there is the terror of Lara Bax and YourWeigh that definitely isn’t a diet! It’s a ‘holistic health guide’, one that includes diet bars with zero calories that fill you up! Now it’s Rose’s turn to see her sister unraveling, her flesh disappearing. It gives her a purpose to get out of the facility, but will she be too late to save Lily when she can’t be bothered to rescue herself? What is self-love to someone feasting on indifference? They are both victims and manipulators, expired products of their parents rotten marriage, twins who don’t seem to have enough spiritual nourishment for both to thrive.

This is one of the saddest novels I’ve read, though it’s about the distortion of female bodies, and all the eating disorders that devour women of all ages, it also exposes the darker side of relationships between friends, family and lovers. The imbalance, the way we manipulate loved ones or allow ourselves to be used, abused and don’t know how to let go or change, is disturbing. Rose hurts herself, but in doing so keeps Lily on a leash, always proving her love through worry. It’s destroying them both. Often, we shuck one unhealthy dependency for another and call it something new. Love can be suffocating, bonds can give us roots but they can also keep us in a place that is slowly killing us. Must love be brutal, painful and punishing? It seems so for Lily, and for Rose too.

Things are shaken up when a celebrity enters rehab and forces Rose to remember uncomfortable things about her sexuality. Can a vanishing body still feel desire? Rose is very much a body, it’s been her entire focus and means of control for so long but where has the rest of her gone? The past isn’t done with her, and the very person who started it all (Mim) may well be a part of the end.

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would as it takes some dark turns and not everyone finds their salvation. We really do get in the way of the ones we love and can be shamefully selfish. What we do to ourselves, we do to each other. It’s provocative, intense, and engaging. I went away with the thought, “even those of us who think we don’t have an issue with food, likely do”, as I already know it’s an impossibility to be alive without complicated relationships that cost us, or someone else something heavy. Yes, read it!

Publication Date: June 30th 2020

HarperCollins Publishers

Harper

Thank you to HarperCollins Publishers and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of this book.
I wish that I could say I liked this book better; however, it was just so heavy. I felt weighed down by the subject matter throughout the entirety. I get that it wasn't supposed to be uplifting but this just wasn't for me. I've seen other people compare it to Girl, Interrupted and I can definitely relate to that opinion. I think the subject matter is important to discuss but all combined, it was just a little too much for me.

***Thanks to NetGalley for providing me a complimentary copy of THIN GIRLS by Diana Clarke in exchange for my honest review.***

I think this book was good, but could have been great. Thin girls explores disordered eating, abusive relationships, addiction, issues with sexual identity. The first part of the book was reminiscent of Girl, Interrupted. The similarities irritated me.
Throughout the book we’re facts and references to books that also irritated me. The main character is supposed to be quirky and somewhat awkward, but I found myself skimming over because I didn’t think it really added to the story other than to slow the plot.
Overall, I would recommend the book. I do think it does an excellent job of drawing attention to various ways people are triggered into eating disorders.

Thin Girls by Diana Clarke could also be titled "Trigger Warning" as the topics that lead this book are all sensitive topics. Eating disorders, mental health, sexuality, relationships, sex....Everything is covered.

Rose and Lily are twins. They feel each other's emotions, they taste each other's feelings, they hurt along side each other. As the girls grow older both struggle with control - Rose with eating, Lily with sex and relationships with men.

The chapters of this book are fluid - moving back and forth from 'modern day' to the past - showing the struggle of youth and the struggle Rose faces every day in the rehab facility where she's been living for the past year.

This is a hard book to write about because it's painful. My heart ached for both Rose and Lily while they worked through their struggles and pain. With every new chapter, I hoped that there would be a resolution to their pain.

Diana Clarke is clearly a talented writer and this book is only the beginning.

Thanks to netGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I have a final copy preordered! I adored this. I think it is honest, wonderful and smart. The characters grow well and learn. Their is great portrayals of eating disorders are true and clear. I enjoyed it and was so excited to find it.

A gorgeously written novel about the physical consequences of suppressing pain. Using identical twins to explore this gives the novel an honest and startling depth. Rose's interjections about animal behavior were equally fascinating and relevant. An extraordinary debut. I will be looking for more from Diana Clarke.

Even if you’ve experienced mental illness yourself, it can be hard to understand and empathize with someone else’s. We see people who are depressed and wonder why they can’t just snap out of it. We see people who are in abusive relationships and are flabbergasted that they can’t walk away. And when someone self-harms or refuses to eat for so long that they run the risk of dying, our response is to shout at them and shove food at them. We expect people to fix themselves. Diana Clarke’s devastating novel, Thin Girls, takes us deep into the world of disordered eating with Rose Winters. Thin Girls is thankfully a book about healing, ultimately, but Rose’s journey back to corporeality and health is brutally real.

Rose and Lily were identical in all ways but one until they turned 14. Their only difference was Lily’s mole. But, like many twins, the girls are treated like two halves of one whole by many people—so much so that Rose’s identity was deeply enmeshed in Lily’s until Lily started to make other friends. It’s tempting to try and identify the precise moment when Rose became an anorexic and Lily started to value men more than she valued herself, but I feel like that would be the wrong approach to Thin Girls (and to understanding eating disorders, as well). The seeds were there, sure, but this book is about the work it takes to undo the damage anorexia does to the body, the mind, and the soul.

Thin Girls is narrated by Rose, with occasional asides in the form of Lily’s writing, letters from an old friend, and facts that are recalled from the nonfiction books that have been abandoned at the facility were Rose spends much of the first part of the novel. Rose moves back and forth in time to show us how she and Lily grew apart, how her anorexia developed, how her sexuality was repeatedly repressed, and how she finds the right person to help her through her recovery. Rose frequently reflects on what it’s like to be hungry, to be so malnourished that one’s own body starts to fail. At times, Rose recalls trying to be two-dimensional or to disappear entirely. This is why I described Rose’s recovery as a path back to corporeality. Rose has to learn how to rejoin her body and the real world in order to leave behind the death spiral of her eating disorder.

In addition to its psychological realism about eating disorders, I really appreciated Clarke’s portrayal of Rose’s relationship with Jemima. So many romantic relationships in fiction either concentrate on fireworks (a la romance novels) or their trials and tribulations (as in so many works of literary fiction). There is, of course, a place for fireworks and for tumult, but what I really love about how Rose and Jemima’s relationship is its tenderness. After all of the damage they’ve done, these women can be caring of and gentle with each other. The brief moments when Jemima makes Rose wait to get into a hot bath or take a sip of fresh coffee so that she doesn’t accidentally burn herself had me tearing up; these moments are pure love—and a much needed dose of emotional relief after the harrowing of the first two-thirds of Thin Girls.

Thin Girls is a shattering read, but one I would recommend (with all the necessary trigger warnings, of course). It is brilliantly written and so true to the characters that I had no problem imagining Rose, Lily, their calorie/perfection obsessed mother, their alcoholic father, Rose’s frenemy-turned-lover Jemima, and the rest of the cast existing somewhere out there in the real world. I think this book has the potential to help us understand what it’s like to have an eating disorder—to really take us inside the mind of someone with anorexia—that it can teach us to not to expect that a slice of cake can cure someone or that we can just show someone their illogic and that they will snap out of their disordered eating. Thin Girls is one of the best books about mental illness that I’ve ever read.

This book deals with exceptionally important issues relating to body image, body dysmorphia, the spectrum of eating disordered behaviour (though mostly on anoretics), diet culture, influencer culture, abuse, being a member of the LGBTQI+ community (and the heightened prevalence of eating disorders therein) and the entrenchment of disordered behaviour in families. For tackling these issues in a way that is entertaining and vital I applaud this book. Unfortunately I cannot bring myself to like Thin Girls because it felt, to me at least, exploitative. It read not as the dramatization of a survivors story (I apologise to the author if this is incorrect) but rather as a warts and all tale of eating disorders written by someone that had trawled “pro-ana” forums the week before writing a first draft. The awful message around treatment, which is presented as at best ridiculous and at worst harmful, is irresponsible. Many excellent treatment programs exist for eating disorders. I (Asst Prof in a Psychiatry Dept) have never heard of patients being asked to flirt with their food as a form of therapy. Where did the author find out about this? I do not deny that there are crappy treatment programs out there but I find it utterly ridiculous that an eating disorder as entrenched as that presented here is cured via roasted vegetables and a seaside cottage. This book will be sought out by eating disordered individuals (famously, and this is something that the author clearly knows, people with eating disorders love to read material that will give them new ideas for weight loss) and the message that treatment is not the answer is a dangerous one.

Yes, the skewering of influencer and diet culture is necessary. Yes, the heightened prevalence of eating disorders (and suicide among other terrible things) in the LGBTQI+ community must be examined, drawn attention to, researched and ultimately prevented. But these messages were lost between the nasty back and forth between the sisters, the apparent lack of research, and the voyeuristic tone and ghoulish look at sufferers of a lethal disease.

This book is triggering. If you have had an eating disorder (or if you currently have one) then I would say avoid this book. The tips and tricks are innumerable and I wish the author had found a way to avoid them. If you are looking for an interesting and well researched book on eating disorders I would recommend Wasted by Marya Hornbacher. Though this book is equally triggering (I think that Hornbacher has been quoted as saying that she wishes she had omitted the tips from her book) it is grounded in scientific inquiry as well as personal experience.

Rose and Lily are twins and develop an unhappy relationship with food from a very young age after getting a lot of this behavior from their mother. Rose becomes anorexic, while Lily continues to overeat and gain unhealthy amounts of weight. Most of this book is rooted in Rose's attempt at recovery and her illness. It affects her relationships and eventually she reaches a turning point and starts to improve. During this time, Lily is in an abusive relationship and starts to lose weight in unhappy ways. I kept hoping this book was going to go somewhere, but it just seemed to drag on. I thought the stories and tidbits in the chapters tended to be interesting, but not enough for me to really care about this book. I think it is an important subject, but this was not the way to cover this.

In this novel we follow two young girls discovering themselves. This was well written and the characters were well written as well. The storyline was great. This novels tackles a lot of great themes such as female friendships, body image, sisterhood and so many other topics. This is a great for for young audiences. A hard-hitting YA contemporary not to be missed.

What is a "thin girl?" A thin girl shrinks herself to nothingness. A thin girl deprives herself of the most basic human needs. A thin girl does not feel whole until she ceases to exist. A thin girl is veritably explored in Diana Clarke's debut novel, Thin Girls. Thin Girls, a literary masterpiece, follows anorexic Rose and her relationship with food, as well as her relationship with her twin sister Lily through their teenage years into young adulthood. This exploitative and harrowing novel takes readers into the devastating depths of disordered eating, and tells the story of twins and how far they will go to save each other.

Lily and Rose are identical ... exactly the same. Except for the mole on Lily's back, there is nary a difference between them, even down to their weight. Exactly the same. The twins are so close, their sameness so entwined in who they are, that they can't even imagine being different. But after a series of defining events starting in high school, Rose's body begins dramatically wilting away while Lily's blossoms and balloons. One twin is now severely underweight, the other over. Fast forward several years, and Rose finds herself in a treatment facility, while Lily begins a relationship with a questionable, married man. With both sisters teetering on the edge of destruction, can they help themselves, and in turn, save each other?

Compelling, haunting, and intense, Diana Clarke's Thin Girls tells a raw, believable story about the all-consuming power of eating disorders. It is no secret that many women are raised to have an unhealthy relationship with food; hating themselves for every "guilty" bite they put into their bodies, and never feeling like they are good enough in their own skin. Clarke's Thin Girls takes this relationship to the extreme, showing how anorexia takes over one young woman's life and strips it to bare nothingness. Clarke writes as if she herself has lived with disordered eating, or else she has studied it closely, making this novel feel true-to-life and all the more excruciating. With that being said, those who have suffered from an eating disorder or an unhealthy relationship with food may find themselves uncomfortable or triggered by the contents of this explicitly descriptive book, and should be advised that this read may not be for everyone.

Interwoven in this story of anorexia is Rose's equally unhealthy relationship with her sister Lily. Although Rose loves Lily more than any person on this Earth, their relationship has always been perilous, dramatic, and extreme. Clarke explores their sisterly bond and shows how the interconnectedness of twins is a most unusual, yet fascinating thing. Rose and Lily can no more separate themselves from each other, than they can live without food or air. Their relationship is intricate and entangled, and adds an interesting, important aspect to this utterly gripping novel.

Thin Girls will be enjoyed by readers of dark, edgy exposés. If you like your fiction raw and your characters deep, melancholic, and slightly dangerous, check this one out.

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Collins for an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Probably the best book I’ve read this year. Profoundly moving story of twins Rose and Lily who are both struggling with their own demons. Rose is battling a vicious eating disorder that is possibly going to end her life, Lily is dealing with physical and psychological abuse from someone who claims to love her. Coming from a very dysfunctional background both women are struggling to find a way to cope. Raw, sometimes hard to read story that will stay with you for a long time. Highly recommend.

4.5 stars, rounded down!

If you have a history with disordered eating, please stay far, far away from this book.

While this book was incredible in so many ways, it is not for people who have an unhealthy relationship with food. It's incredibly triggering.

For those who have a healthy relationship with food, this is a real look into the mind of someone with an eating disorder; and a good look into how toxic diet culture is.

I honestly hesitate rating this book so high. I read it in almost two sittings, unable to put it down. It got under my skin, in my head, and I couldn't put it down until I finished it. I hesitate to rate it so high because of how triggering it is.

But books like this do hold an important place, they are a raw look into how unbelievably difficult it is to be a woman dealing with her body, and the toxic messages constantly being thrown in our face on a regular message. Be skinny. Be thin. Be curvy. Be anything other than what you are, at this very moment in time.

So while this book is vicious look into our current diet culture, it's also dangerous in the wrong hands. It's often too descriptive, there are too many numbers (weight, calories, etc.) and there are too many 'tips and tricks' shared.

I don't think it was the author's intention for this book to be triggering, but by nature of the topic and details, it is. And the writing is so insanely good, that it's just so real.

The writing is so good that I am really looking forward to the author's next book. I just hope it's about something a little less triggering.

Honestly, I need to get out of my head after reading this one. It took me to a dark place, despite the message being anti-diet culture. I feel a lot of reader's will have a similar reaction reading this one.

Again, if you have a history of disordered reading, please stay away from this, and books like this.

A big thanks to HarperCollins Publishers and NetGalley for the ARC and wanting my honest opinion!

I was completely blown away by this book, to the point that I hardly know what to say about it. Thin Girls was a stunning look into the mind of a woman with severe anorexia--not something I have any experience with, so maybe that's why it was so transportive. This book reminded me a lot of Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House in the way that it incorporates bits of criticism or seemingly unrelated topics and connects them with the story. I could not put Thin Girls down and eagerly look forward to whatever Diana Clarke writes next.

This is the story of Rose, a 24 year old recovering from anorexia, and her overweight twin sister, Lily. Their relationship is complex and flashbacks provide information from their childhood, describing what has led them to their food and body issues. The author did an admirable job with the difficult topic of anorexia and bulimia. This is Clarke's first novel and I would be inclined to read more by her in the future.

Thanks to NetGalley and Harper Collins Publishers for the advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book takes your heart & tosses it away, only to bring it back at a later date and make you feel whole again. Its very thought provoking and showcases the struggles many people have with diet culture and feeling comfortable in your own skin. If you read one book this year - make this it! YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT!

This book was astounding and profound. I was engaged throughout and moved. Highly recommend this book if you want to think and be more connected to the world around you.

I received an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book was a bit prosaic, didn’t ring 100% authentic in voice to me as a ED survivor (we were never that articulate or self aware) but the emotions tracked. 3.5 rounded up. Definitely more for craft than veritas.

What a SUPERB novel. There wasn’t a moment I didn’t enjoy reading this. Honestly. There are so many levels of depth in this from eating disorders to abusive relationships to coming out as LGBT. I want to rave about this book. I want everyone to read it. Right now.

Alas, because it has not been released yet, I will not spoil too much for those awaiting its release.

Rose and Lily are twins, and from as early as they can remember, they have always been the “same,” as many twins believe they are when young. However, of course, things change and Thin Girls gives us a glimpse into how two people who are supposedly the same can become so different over time; how they can become different even from the exact same situations which broke them.

The entire time I sympathized so much with Rose. Having had my own eating disorder when I was younger, many of the thoughts she had were similar to those I once did, too. Therefore, this book may trigger some readers, if not careful.

I really enjoyed how everything came together. The romances. The sisterhood. Friendships. Even the ending was great. It was simple: it was that of hope.

Thank you so much to HarperCollins for this book! I can’t wait to get a physical copy when it comes out, as it is now one of my favorite novels.

Thin Girls is the story of twins, Rose & Lily as told by Rose. Their relationship is the heart of the story, as it is of their lives. As the book opens Rose is at a treatment facility for anorexia. Rose provides us with a very personal account of anorexia, and perhaps a bit more understanding of this disease. Ultimately this is a book about love in all its forms. It is an engaging read with compelling characters.