Feeling For Bones

By Bethany Pierce

Book Overview

Pressurized family dynamics and a dysfunctional church experience force 16-year-old Olivia to seek her own reality. For her self-image as a thinker, painter, and older sister, Olivia determines who she thinks she ought to be.

Her baggy clothes and exhaustive calorie scrutiny can't cover up the fact that she is allowing her body to wither away. As Olivia encounters small town prying and a tighter-than-comfortable rental house, her escape becomes her art. And her goal becomes the impossible perfection of airbrushed magazine models.

Feeling For Bones is Olivia's story as her struggles become more than physical and she is finally led to the answers she was running from all along.

This story opens up a window to the thought processes and struggles of teen and college-aged women who struggle with eating disorders. Young women will find a friend who thinks like they do. And mothers will find a compatriot in the battle to help their daughters deal with body image.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080246288X
• ISBN13: 9780802462886
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: Moody Publishers
• Length: 350 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Feeling For Bones

I'm enjoying this book. It's an interesting account of a teenage girl's experiences with battling a deadly eating disorder. A good novel for sure. I would advise others to read with caution though, as some of the contents might be triggering to some.

An exquisite portrait!

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.

You won't be disappointed.

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

Don't miss out on Feeling for Bones

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.

One of My Favorites!

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.