Sixteen-year old, Zoe gets packed up and shipped off to Twin Birch, a six week program for anorexia girls. But Zoe doesn’t believe she fits the profile and soon finds out that the other patients agree. So why exactly is she there? With no contact with the outside world Zoe has to try to piece this puzzle together surrounded by individuals that she believes she has nothing in common with. So Zoe starts to write letters back home to her best friend Elise. These letters go into great detail explaining the situation at hand, reliving their past and she asks Elise to write back, but in all of them we hear desperation in Zoe’s voice. Zoe is frustration at her current situation because she feels like a prisoner and she really wants to go home. She doesn’t feel she should be a patient and be fed the large amounts of food she is currently having to eat and go to daily therapy. She is noticing weight gain and she doesn’t like it. She desperately wants a letter from Elise and doesn’t understand why her best friend has not written back. Her life is falling apart. Zoe does make some friends with the other girls in the facilities but in her mind she feels they are there for a reason (to get better) and she can’t seem to find out why she landed herself there. This mystery and the drama between the characters take up a large portion of the book and it isn’t until last quarter of the book do we really find out what the title of the book is all about. What does Zoe really have to let go of, to really move on? Once you figure that out, things really get interesting and there are some major breakthroughs in the mystery and Zoe has some issues to address. Sometimes we all like to forget things, to try to erase events in our lives, but certain things we have to accept and this one Zoe, is reality. The element of the mystery was played out very nice. I supposed you could have seen the answer up front if you wanted but I played along and let the drama unfold before me. I enjoyed seeing the girls interact among themselves and hearing Zoe comments. The food they were served sounded ridiculous and then having the actual recipes intermingled among the chapters, did not make any sense to me. I was glad the author talked about how some of the girls had been in treatment many times and how hard it was. The book was not all about Zoe and the reason she was at the treatment center but touched lightly on some of the other issues the girls were facing.As far as issues in this book (sex, language,) there were one reference to b***h that I recall and there were references to cat-calling. The subject matter of anorexia is a serious subject so this book should be for mature readers only.
