Light Enough to Float

By: Lauren Seal

Narrated by: Shannon Tyo

Deeply moving and authentic, this debut novel in verse—winner of a Schneider Family Book Award Honor—follows teenage Evie through her eating disorder treatment and recovery―a perfect choice for readers of Wintergirls and Louder Than Hunger.

Evie has just barely acknowledged that she has an eating disorder when she’s admitted to an inpatient treatment facility. Now her days are filled with calorie loading, therapy sessions, and longing—for home, for control, and for the time before her troubles began. As the winter of her treatment goes on, she gradually begins to face her fears and to love herself again, with the help of caregivers and of peers who are fighting their own disordered-eating battles. This insightful, beautiful novel will touch every reader and offer hope and understanding to those who need it most.

Critic reviews

Schneider Family Book Award Honor Winner

"Skillfully crafted . . . A realistically complex yet hopeful account of eating disorder treatment." —Kirkus Review

"An emotionally complex novel that that will linger in readers' minds."—Booklist

"The tone and tempo of this verse novel tracks with Evie’s journey toward healing. Spare, hyper focused, and compulsive at first, the cadence moving with a staccato franticness; as she comes to terms with her diagnosis and treatment, eventually a steadiness—fragile, to be sure—threads through the text. . . . A smart acknowledgment of the effect that social media has on disordered eating." —The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

You’ve read this before

2.5 STARS rounded down

If a book blurb is going to compare itself to a classic like Laurie Halse Anderson’s WINTERGIRLS “for a new generation”, it better come close to the blurb or readers like me will feel let down.

Lauren Seal says in the preface that she’s taken her experience with anorexia as a teenager to help form Evie and the plot. She takes so much liberty for the treatment program it’s laughable.

Adults and minors aren’t housed in the same ward, let alone as roommates by law in my state and I’d bet most every other state too due to liability issues for the minor. Only the wealthiest patients can afford four months in a treatment facility in the USA. Inpatient psych treatment is basically triage until the patient is no longer a threat to self or others. If anyone can get a hospital to pay for a week, that’s a long stay. When I got into the field in the early 1990s, psychologists complained how insurances were *only* paying for twenty-eight days. Had we known then what we now, we highly have been grateful.

I don’t think verse was the best method of telling the story LIGHT ENOUGH TO FLOAT, which reads like every other book involving a treatment center:
Patient is resistant
Something Very Bad Happens
Patient embraces recovery.

LIGHT ENOUGH TO FLOAR MIGHT APPEAL to MG readers, but not teens.