Customer Reviews

The Luckiest Girl in the World : A Young Skater Battles Her Self-Destructive Impulses

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Katie Roskova is a preteen ice skater striving to be a champion. She attends a private school where she keeps up her popularity, her 3.5 G.P.A, and most importantly, her smile. Along with her hectic schedule, each day Katie also shelters a secret. This secret is the only thing that keeps her sane when she begins to lose sight of her goals and her grip on reality, what she calls `spacing out'. She knows that is anyone ever finds out about her secret, she will be thought of as a monster. So she hides her secret, just as she hides the pair of scissors that are now lying in her bag protected by a clean white washcloth. The same pair that, previously that day, slid down her wrists, her elbows, her thighs, anywhere she could easily hide away. She would be tagged as a 'cutter' if anyone bothers to pay attention, but nobody expects it. Katie hides her secret well and always has, but the one-day she slips her English teacher starts to suspect the pretty little skater girl. Katie begins to lose control and her world, as she knows it, begins to spin quickly out of control. She is then challenged with keeping up her championship dreams, not disappointing her mother or her counselor, Sandy, and keeping her `condition' under control.
Steven Levenkron, the author of The Luckiest Girl in the World, does a respectable job portraying self-mutilation, which is a rising issue that is threatening teens and adolescents more and more each day. He, in my opinion, takes things a step farther. Instead of writing about what people commonly think `cutters' are, which is reclusive, depressed, and lacking friends, he writes about the truth. How self-mutilation touches the lives of everyone including the people like Katie, who you think are too wonderful to believe that they could ever be involved in something of that stature.
The Luckiest Girl in the World is an exceptionally written novel that can be enjoyed by everyone. It is inspirational, compassionate, and tells you the truth about what people are going through when they turn to self-mutilation. People like Katie, who think that they are not the `cutting' type and are confused by what they do, can read this novel and regain their hope. It tells `cutters' that they are not alone and people will not completely hate them for what they do. It also shows people who are not `cutters' what it feels like to be in that kind of situation, in full force. I can say that this novel is an ultimate piece of salvation.

Levenkron takes an incredibly complex subject and turns it into a movie of the week. He's got his facts wrong -- the type of repetitive/compulsive self-injury he depicts is not related to psychosis at all. It's obvious that the all-wise, all-loving incredibly perceptive white-haired male psychotherapist is meant to be him, and the school counselor he uses as contrast is a cartoonish bad guy. The reader never really gets a good idea of what's going on, why the girl cuts, or why she stops.

Most self-harm is about coping, not psychosis -- people who never learned good ways to handle overwhelming feelings (or lack of feeling/dissociation) sometimes turn to physical self-harm as a way of reducing physiological arousal and getting back to a noramal state for them. Levenkron doesn't address this at all. In the five years I've been running a self-harm support email list, the dozens and dozens of people I've seen stop hurting themselves have achieved it by learning to look at their feelings and actively choosing another way (besides self-harm) to cope. Some had therapists to guide them. All of them did a lot of really hard work to relearn coping. The magical-therapist assumption doesn't validate that or even take it into account.

It's not the absolute worst possible book on this subject, but I'd've expected better.

As in his previous work of fiction, The Best Little Girl In The World, Levenkron explains a disorder away with family problems, in this case a father who left and a mother who physically abused her child in order to "encourage" her. This girl is conveniently surrounded by people who care about her, in particular "Sandy Sherman", the ever-so-wonderful psychologist (featured previously in The Best Little Girl...) who jots down notes about her progress, letting the reader know how well our Katie is coming along. It simplifies a complex disorder into "family problems and too much pressure make little girls want to cut themselves". Levenkron, in the guise of Sandy Sherman, explains that Katie has a personality disorder which triggers her moments of "spacing out", something which is *not* common to self-injurers and should not be used to explain it. A final word of warning to anyone who hurts themselves, or has recently stopped - this book is *extremely* triggering, and should be avoided.

First off, yes, it has its faults. The therapist, Sandy Sherman, is obviously a self-insertion and Katie's skating is something that few people could relate to. The plot line is easily predictable and nearly identical to that of "The Best Little Girl in the World." Keep in mind that the idea isn't to entertain, but rather, to educate people about self-injury.
Her parents are rather stereotypical (abusive mother, not-there father), but several of my friends who cut have similar parents. They're not identical, but it's a close enough variation to be believable. I'm not saying ALL self-harmers parents fit into that stereotype, but some do.
I've noticed that a lot of people have criticized the dissociative parts of the novel ("I don't space out like that when I cut, so it's total BS," etc). True, only about half of cutters dissociate. It would have been nice if that'd been explained more clearly, but it didn't fit into the plot particularly well to do so. I think the hope is that people might read his non-fiction book on self-harm after reading Luckiest Girl, or look into it elsewhere to get more information. It's obviously not possible to include all the information on self-harm in one book, especially a fiction.
I've also seen criticisms about him choosing a young girl to play the roll, since not all cutters are young women. Yes, it would have been nice if he'd clairifed that not all cutters are young women, but statistically (to my knowledge), most cutters are middle school/high school teen girls. Again, it's not fair to ask him to cover all possibilities in one young adult book. He choose the most common victim age/sex. For one of the first books on the subject, that makes sense.
There've also been critisms that he doesn't understand at all, as is evident by how he writes about the self-harm episodes. They're already triggering enough, making them any more graphic could make the book dangerous for self-harmers who read it. Yes, they're rather...general...but that can be explained by:
A) He doesn't self harm himself.
B) More details makes them more triggering to self harmers.
C) The more specific he gets, the less likely self-harmers who read it will be able to feel understood. Everyone self-harms differently. Hell, just by making her dissociative, half the SI's who read it feel it's BS.
D) Self-injurers who're looking for new ways to self-harm probably won't get any out of this book (I know several SI's who do that, so don't dismiss it).
The short version, for those who skipped over most of what I wrote above: The book successfully gives the reader a VERY BASIC understanding of cutting. That's all that can be realistically done in a book of it's type. Hopefully people would have the common sense to look into self-injury more after reading it if they know anyone who self-harms. I would strongly recommend it.

Steven Levenkron is quick to capitalize on the disease of the week, wanting to be the first to feed his own ego by exploiting a serious disorder. As a novel, this book is a disaster. The characters are one-dimensional (bad mother, good teacher) and the "evil" of the mother is simply unbelievable. The "hero" of the book is really the kindly patient therapist - obviously Levenkron's conception of himself. I am a self-injurer in my 40's, and I'd like to point out that not all self-injurers are young, pretty, lost girls. But the poor little girl seems a character Levenkron is drawn to - which makes me wonder if he treats his own patients with such paternal condescension. Also, the young pretty girl book is a lot more commercially viable, and it's hard to read this book without feeling that Levenkron had one eye on the bottom line and the round of talk shows such a book could generate. Levenkron presents a simple answer to the reason for his character's cutting - simple and obvious, when in fact, the causes of cutting are extremely complicated and rarely fit into a tidy little explanation. But a tidy explanation suits what seems to be Levenkron's primary need - to show what a wonderful therapist he is. This attitude also carries over quite strongly into his self-serving non-fiction book, "Cutting." The problem of self-mutilation is being brought out into the open more and more, and there are several good books on the subject. This is not one of them.

I can hardly fathom that anyone who read the Best Little Girl in the World, could enjoy this book. The one-dimensional character of Katie is exactally like that of Kessa, and the plots are so similar that one would think that they are both the same story. I commend the author for attempting to bring a pressing problem for our youth under the spotlight, but with a character that hardly anyone can relate to (a thirteen-year-old champion ice skater and her over-bearing mother) it won't come as a surprise that the novel will not have the same effect as other books on the subject.

I liked _The Best Little Girl in the World_, and I've cut myself, so I thought I'd read this one, too.

But I found I'd read it before: it IS his other book, with cutting substituted everywhere he'd initially written anorexia.

This book is pat, it's unrealistic. It may have been written with the best of intentions, but it's failed in providing anything near an accurate depiction of self-injury.

It seems to be merely trying to capitalise on the success of his earlier book. Perhaps this is unfair; perhaps he wants only to bring this problem to the forefront. This book may do it -- but it is still not a good book, it is still ultimately predictable and not a good picture of what self-injury is like.

The book is, mostly, artificial -- someone outside looking in, but with only the most limited of samples to base it on. The *only* thing it has going for it is that it's one of few books to address the subject.

So I'd recommend it -- if you wanted to know what self-injury wasn't.

I think that this book was a little overdramatic. The character 'Sandy Sherman' was obviously a self-insertion, which annoyed me greatly to start out with. The description of the therapist matched the small photograph of the author in the inside cover perfectly.

The description of self-mutilaton was a bit off and had a melodramatic feel that made it seem a lot less real. Some of the more graphic parts seemed like almost replicas of sections in books such as "Saint Jude", "Cut", and "Crosses"'.

The friends that recommended this book to me cut themselves, so I was actually a bit inwardly glad that the book did not suggest any way to 'cut' other than with a pair of sissors. It does not take a genius to figure that one out. However, I feel that this book helped me personally, because now I have a vague of an idea about how my friends may be thinking and feeling, even if they aren't ice skaters or have abusive moms.

As a self-injurer, I am amazed at how well Mr. Levenkron presents the emotions behind the problem. In reading his books on the subject, both this and Cutting, you can tell that he is well-versed on self-mutilation and knows what he is talking about, although definitely more from the professional side than not.
I was surprised that more people did not have high praises of this book, when I read it before I started cutting, I truly felt the feelings Katie felt - the sensitivity Mr. Levenkron had when writing about this fictional girl was poignant. When I read it after I started cutting, I learned a little bit more about my problem, and I felt like I had company in what appeared to me to be insanity.
I feel like Mr. Levenkron has written an excellent book (one that I have read countless times and still adore) and I would recommend it to anyone, 'cutter' or not. After high school, I hope to become a psychologist, and it is my wish that I can be one as excellent as I feel Steven Levenkron is.

I'm a dormant cutter who was practicing for awhile because I would get so flipped out over something and so upset that all of a sudden I couldn't feel anymore and I would have to cut myself in order to feel again. This book I read before I really got into cutting and it helped me understand the feelings that I was having. Eventually I stopped because of one of my friends, but it wasn't easy. I stopped in a very similar way to the main character, so I can easily appreciate why she did it, I can also appreciate her reluctance in group therapy(I refuse to go to any sort of therapy) I am a big fan of this book, mostly because it's easy for people who do not suffer from this illness to understand. Now, whether or not they're getting the entire story about why we do the things we do is a completely different story. I believe strongly that had my mother read this book she might have been able to figure out I was cutting before I stopped. The therapist was what gave me the original inspiration for going into therapy in the first place. And the therapist my mother sent me to was my motivation for leaving therapy. The characters were definately believable, I'm a lot like the skater/straight A student/perfect kid/cutter. Or at least outwardly I am. It would have been nice had he managed to give an accurate portrayal of the disease and it's symptoms, I'd like for people to read this so they can understand what we're thinking when we do this sort of thing, even if this isn't exactly what happens. I do think that her last cutting is a bit...unbelievable, since most don't do that sort of thing in that situation, but I'm not going to spoil the ending so that's all I'll say. If you don't suffer from this disease, read it. It might help you understand it a little bit better.