Customer Reviews

Feeling For Bones

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I was a little skeptical of reading Feeling for Bones because I know so many other "eating disorder" novels that include a girl with a body image problem. But the main focus of the story is not the anorexia of a teenage girl. There are so many relatable elements to the story: family dynamics, teenage relationships, and spiritual realization. The spiritual undertone increases as the characters and plot develop. Pierce completes the story with a beatiful illustration of God's care and healing power. I recommend this story to women who are craving to know more about Jesus Christ and realize him through everday situations. Men would also benefit from the story in their understanding of the thought processes of women during difficult situations in life.

One of Christian fiction's newest and best first novels, FEELING FOR BONES, is just out -- and you don't want to miss it. In this beautifully written debut novel, newcomer Bethany Pierce crafts a memoir-like look at a young minister's daughter who battles anorexia and struggles to discover her inner beauty. Pierce is an unusually gifted writer whose book comes across as excellent literature rather than preaching, a problem with so many message-driven Christian novels.

After a distressing church vote, 16-year-old Olivia's father has lost his job as pastor. She, her younger sister, the oddly named Callapher, and their parents leave Ohio for the Appalachian Mountains where they rent a house owned by their Great-Aunt Margaret and her friend, Ruby, who they call "the Old Maids." Olivia immediately nicknames the two-bedroom, one-bathroom decrepit house "the Shoe Box." "Think we can suffer for Jesus here, don't you?" says her father, ironically.

Olivia's sense of helplessness and emptiness in the face of upheaval comes through Pierce's memorable scenes and some rich passages in the book. "I thought of my father. When I saw him in my mind, he was always just looking up from a book, an expression of bewilderment in his eyes...." Her dad quits going to church and sleeps in on Sunday mornings, while Olivia's mother tiptoes around, trying not to disturb him. "Looking into the shadows of the bedroom, I felt I had physically come face-to-face with the very substance of my own despair," muses Olivia. She is afraid. Controlling her eating is a way --- the way --- Olivia has of controlling her fear.

As Olivia struggles to discover her place in the world apart from her appearance, she finds help in unusual places. "The summer job saved me," she says of her part-time work at a car lot office. Her best friends Mollie and Matthew involve her in creative pursuits and help her focus on things other than food --- or not thinking about food. "I ate without tasting, even, crowding my belly...and still feeling, in a different place, a deep and hollow emptiness."

Pierce is an English professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, as well as an artist. These two talents are evident as the novel unfolds in beautiful, descriptive prose. The opening lines are particularly evocative:

"At the age of sixteen, I suffered recurring nightmares. I was running as hard as I could while my destination on the horizon receded to a pinpoint and vanished like the white pop of an old television screen winking out. I lay in a trance at the bottom of a pool, suffocating beneath an invisible, silent weight; people's voices reached my ears across a great distance, and the reflection of my body was always before me, wavering in myriad and grotesque distortions."

Following Olivia into her interior world is an education in how some women view their bodies. Glued to Olivia's bedroom wall is a collage of beautiful women --- women in stilettos, women in lingerie, women with thick lips, billowing hair and flat bellies --- who Olivia sees as typifying beauty. She recalls her earliest memories of her father reading fairy tales to her, stories of pretty princesses. She remembers her mother buying her bridal magazines as a treat, full of lovely models "getting the prince." Is it any wonder, we realize, that girls grow up with distorted ideas of what true beauty is?

As Olivia paints and is introduced to poetry, her interior life slowly begins to take on importance over her exterior appearance. The end is redemptive without being in any way saccharine.

If you enjoy beautiful writing and rich, dark, intriguing inspirational fiction, then you'll love FEELING FOR BONES. If you only read one new novelist in Christian fiction this year, start here. You won't be disappointed.

--- Reviewed by Cindy Crosby

If you're into the subject of this book, then you might think it is worth it, but of all the books I've read over the last couple of years, this one was the least gripping for sure.

I think the cover and the pages next to each chapter are an awesome touch, and I like how she describes her cute little sister and all of the funny things she says... these are reasons why I could say I liked this book enough to have kept reading it.

But this book doesn't go into anything in any depth. She doesn't go into her eating disorder much, doesn't go into the relationship she has with the boy... it all gets glossed over, and at the end, you don't feel like you know what the book was even about?

I thought the part where she lays in the snow and has a realization might have had some meaning, but it really wasn't enough to make you satisfied after reading the whole book.

Well, I had high hopes for this book based on the high reviews I read. I am also interested in the subject of anorexia. Although the way the book danced around this issue, was strange - there was not subtle leading into it, as the book starts off with the main character fully displaying this disorder. Her naivete of what the disorder actually was pretty shocking, too. I was also surprised at just how secular this Christian fiction novel was. It was very well written, but I just couldn't really identify with any of the characters, and felt like I was waiting for something to be revealed which never was...

Bethany Pierce's first novel, Feeling for Bones, is an exquisite portrait of a young girl faced with a misperception about her self. Pierce has a talent for seeing through her character's eyes, whether that's a six-year old girl or an elderly aunt and for bringing her reader into the pages of the book. Feeling for Bones has a strong message of salvation that will benefit anyone at any station in life.

Feeling for Bones deals with a young girl and her struggle with relationships to God, people, and food. This is a beautiful and uplifiting story, one of my all time favorites.

The premise of this book is a good one: family dynamics, religion, financial struggle and body image all come into play in "Feeling for Bones." But the story is so slow and fragmented, that nothing ever seems to happen or be resolved. Every time something 'exciting' happens, that story line is squashed. There are a few events in this book that could make for a good novel,but they're not explored. Unfortunately, the author has chosen to turn a teenager's battle with anorexia into a religious conflict. We learn very little about the root of the problem - in fact, the most character development we see is in the minor characters of the novel. And it seems like when she was tired of writing, the author wrapped up the entire story in a nice little blanket of religious revelation and poof - problem solved. I'm happy I only paid $0.89 for this one.

This book is about a teenaged girl struggling with anorexia while her family struggles to survive after he father's been fired.

Olivia grew up as a pastor's kid until her father was fired. Now, her father, is disillusioned by the church, her mother is trying to keep a semblance of a happy home on a budget and growing tired of her husband's unemployment, and her sister runs away feeling neglected. And to make things worse, they've been planted in the middle of a small town, and you know what people say about small towns!

Olivia's walls are papered with magazine cutouts of beautiful women--women she desperately desires to model, and women with whom she'll never be able to compete.

But's it's not just about body image, for even when Olivia realizes that her eating habits are a disorder, it's not so easy to fix. Still, every night she counts the calories and fat grams and makes sure everything fits into the food pyramid. The counting soothes her and gives her a sense of control in a helpless situation.

New beginnings. That's what it's really about.

This book is excellently written with real characters that get up and walk around us. While I wouldn't use the word "quirky", each characters has their own quirks that makes you think, "That's just crazy enough to be true!" Pierce gets inside Olivia's head and creates a cast of sympathetic and flawed characters.

It has one of the best conversion scenes I've seen, although I think for me there was still a sense of, wow, so everything's just fixed now? at the end.

An annoyance in the book: catch words. Pierce made a habit out of "retorted." Olivia and her sister often retorted, and it began to get on my nerves.

Also, Olivia's narration sometimes felt pedantic. "This is how I felt. This is what I was thinking." I knew that already because Pierce did an excellent job of showing that, so I didn't need that, and those parts sludged for me.

But a good book. If you like Lisa Samson, I think you'll like this book.

It took me a long time to finish this book, and being the avid reader that I am, this is completely out of character for me... I felt the book didn't move quickly enough, the focus of the book wasn't clear, and the characters weren't developed enough. I would say it's worth reading, but not something I'd read again, and not something that's a page turner.

I cannot rave about this book enough. I lent it to my friends--each from different backgrounds and ages--and each connected deeply with this book.

The characters in Pierce's novel are utterly human, complete with both flaws and beauty. As someone who went through some eating struggles similar to Olivia's, her words and perspective rang true. Describing her surroundings in terms such as "sunken," "bloated," or "bird-like" was such an accurate way of depicting a anorexia-tainted perspective and revealed how those with eating disorders can view everything in terms of their own struggle.

On the other hand, I would not necessarily recommend this book to someone currently with an eating disorder or with eating disorder tendencies. I think it could potentially be a trigger for those thoughts. It depends on the person. However, I would unblinkingly recommend this book to family members of someone struggling with an eating disorder because it is educational.

And to book lovers who are not necessarily interested in eating disorders? Read it. Buy it. Seriously. This is not a book to miss. It's unforgettable.