Skinny

Author: Donna Cooner
Goodreads Rating: 3.91
Pages: 260
Format: ARC from BEA12

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.

This was a really good, cliche book. When I say really good, I mean really good for a straight forward cliche book where the morbidly obese girl finally discovers who she is, and that she can like herself after loosing all this weight. She doesn't realize that she's in love with another character, and she realizes that "Skinny," the evil little voice in her head that told her she wasn't good enough, was wrong. People did like her and wanted to be her friend before she lost this weight, but "Skinny" didn't let it happen.

I really didn't like Ever. She was sort of a bitch to everyone and was really immature, and while "Skinny" said everything that people thought, I felt that her reactions based on "Skinny" were a little out of line. For example, she went off on her best friend because "Skinny" said something in her head. It was entirely unjustified and unfair.

Everything in this book also worked itself out a little too perfectly. She loses the weight, gets the guy, fixes things with her family, gets the lead in the play despite not having the professional experience everyone else has, even winds up with the Queen B for a best friend. While Ever does have a lot of challenges and hurdles, she seems to face them off the pages of the book so what we see of her character development was limited to her hating herself, deciding to get surgery, and then her recovery from the surgery. It all seemed so superficial and like her growth was just a decision and not something she really went through.


I didn't like ever, but I did love Briella and Rat because they were good people and good characters, and more dimensional than Ever was. I feel badly for Donna Cooner, the author, whose life experience inspired Skinny, but this book just didn't speak to me. I was okay in the end.

The Courts Decision: