Résumé
Résumé
Telling a story of a rarely recognized segment of eating disorder sufferers--young men--A Trick of the Light by Lois Metzger is a book for fans of the complex characters and emotional truths in Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls and Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why.
Mike Welles had everything under control. But that was before. Now things are rough at home, and they're getting confusing at school. He's losing his sense of direction, and he feels like he's a mess. Then there's a voice in his head. A friend, who's trying to help him get control again. More than that--the voice can guide him to become faster and stronger than he was before, to rid his life of everything that's holding him back. To figure out who he is again. If only Mike will listen.
Critiques (4)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
The story of 15-year-old Mike Welles's descent into anorexia is narrated by the disease itself, the insidious voice inside his head preying on his every vulnerability. The voice waits patiently for an opening, which comes in the form of Mike's parents' marital crisis and his insecurity around a new crush, pushing Mike to exercise, coaching him to subsist on next to nothing, and encouraging a friendship with Amber, who is also anorexic. Mike drops weight, isolates himself, and yearns to be thinner, which he equates with true strength. A therapist eventually tells Mike that he has been eclipsed and, "the only real thing about you now is your eating disorder." Metzger, in her first novel since Missing Girls (1999), lays bare this truth in an unsettling story that offers a painful and necessary account of how eating disorders affect boys, too. Metzger's choice to cast the disease is the role of narrator forces readers inside Mike's head, an extremely uncomfortable yet illuminating way to examine this lethal disease. Ages 14-up. Agent: Susan Cohen, Writers House. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Critique de Horn Book
The narrator of this startlingly original book is a voice inside fifteen-year-old Mike Welles's head. At first, the voice seems to be on Mike's side, urging him to be better, stronger -- "infinitely strong." But then it tells Mike to lie (to doctors, parents, teachers), turns him against his friends and toward self-destructive behaviors, and pushes him to work out beyond the limits of his endurance -- and to starve himself. Metzger's compelling psychological drama takes on the subject of a boy with an eating disorder. The narrative voice -- Mike's eating disorder, personified -- is the star of this masterfully written novel, which becomes a horror story of sorts, complete with a two-headed Cyclops (an art project) and a chorus of voices that sound like something out of Harry Potter (but that help to dilute the one, destructive voice). Eventually -- after a hospital stint, group and family therapy, and sustained support from his friends -- Mike begins first to question the voice, then to acknowledge that it "gets [him] to do things he shouldn't. It acts like it's [his] best friend but really it wants to kill him," and finally to find the strength to begin to take a stance against it. "It won't be easy, Mike thinks, but it's a step in the right direction." dean schneider (c) Copyright 2013. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Critique de Kirkus
A young stop-motion-film enthusiast's encounter with anorexia, as narrated by...his eating disorder? Readers first meet Mike through the eyes of an unidentified narrator who is following him. It gradually becomes clear that the narrator is not a person but a voice Mike sometimes hears. The voice gains influence when Mike's father leaves his mother for a younger woman, and soon, Mike is starving himself. A new friend, Amber Alley, teaches him to eat as little as possible and gives him tips on how to hide what he's doing from his parents. Mike's eating disorder ramps up jarringly quickly, particularly given that its only apparent external trigger is a conversation in which Mike hounds a girl to go out with him, then demands to know if her refusal is because he's fat (whether Mike is fat by anyone's standards but the voice's is unclear from the text). The story is well-plotted and its prose engaging, but the central conceit leaves a distracting number of questions unanswered. Who is this voice? What are its motivations? Why does it choose Mike? An ambitious and unusual take on teens and eating disorders--but not an entirely satisfactory one. (Fiction. 12-18)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique de Booklist
The first time 15-year-old Mike hears the voice in his head, he's stunned. Am I crazy? he thinks. Things are weird at home; his parents are separating, and Mike is on his own except for the mysterious voice until he encounters Amber. Their meeting seems fortuitous, since Mike has vowed to get in shape, and Amber seems to know everything about nutrition. What he doesn't know is that Amber is anorexic, and her advice is dangerous. Meanwhile, the voice is becoming increasingly powerful and insidious, promising Mike that he can be fit and infinitely strong if he will just exercise obsessively and avoid food. Eventually, Mike winds up in the hospital as one of the million males in America who have eating disorders. Metzger's cautionary tale is made more powerful and dramatic by her choice of narrator: the voice in Mike's head. Readers will be easily caught by the quandary: Will the voice prevail, or will Mike recover control of his mind and his body before it's too late?--Cart, Michael Copyright 2010 Booklist