Starvation

By: Molly Fennig

Narrated by: John Andrews

Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

Sixteen-year-old Wes McCoy is not the favorite child. He does not have a wrestling scholarship to Stanford nor does he live up to the family legacy as an athlete, unlike his brother, Jason. But when Jason dies in a car accident on the way to the state high school wrestling championship, Wes turns to food to give him the control over his life he didn’t have before, and the kind of success he never tasted.

Told through alternating past and present chapters, Wes must come to terms with more than Jason’s death. There’s Caila, a defiant girl who introduces him to the painful pleasure of starving. And there’s Collin, Wes’s best friend who speaks in Shakespearean insults and with whom his relationship is irreparably damaged. But most of all, Wes must take back control from his eating disorder as he learns more about himself and the mystery surrounding Jason’s accident, before he loses his life and those closest to him.

©2020 Immortal Works (P)2021 Immortal Works

Baskerville Book Reviews

As far as eating disorders go, I can’t vouch for how authentic this is, as I’ve never known anybody who had one. As a reader, the downward slide of the characters seemed to progress at a believable pace. It allows you to get into the head of the main character and see things from their perspective as their issue develops. The story doesn’t have a happy ending, it has more of a ‘this is my story, and I don’t know how it ends yet’ ending, which I found oddly haunting.

The book does that “then” and “now” back-and-forth method of storytelling, which I can’t stand. It just led to confusion on my part, as I rarely pay attention to chapter headers. I’m sure it would be much less of an issue if you’re reading a physical copy, but for the audiobook, where “then” just blends into the rest of the story, it’s easy to miss.

The narrator is a bit bland.o While he’s good at acting out the lines, he fails to give characters distinct voices, making it difficult to tell them apart. When I slowed the audio to 1.0x speed, it sounded as if he was in a large, empty room with an ever-present static in the background that was noticeable at 2.55x speed.

NOTE: This copy was provided to me free of charge as a digital review copy. The opinions stated in this review are mine and mine alone, I was not paid or requested to give this book a certain rating, suggestion, or approval.

Hard topic but great awareness and execution

This was a great book. It was a very real story that had a twist that I was not expecting. This would be a great resource for people who want more information/different perspectives of people with eating disorders.

The narration was engaging and really brought the characters to life. I would recommend other books narrated by John.

Powerful, compelling, well-narrated

5/5 stars.
The narrator brings this story to life with a powerful and skilled performance.


Molly Fennig gives us a "can't put it down" story of mental health, love - romantic and family, and the messiness of life. As a psychologist, I appreciate how realistic the descriptions and prescriptions are, and how clever the structure of the story - BEFORE, AFTER and NOW!

It is clear that the author cares deeply about those suffering from eating and emotional disorders/distress. May this book help us all appreciate that these afflictions happen with girls and boys, and that there are many reasons that illness occurs. And that those suffering may do so very privately.