Atlas Girl: Finding Home in the Last Place I Thought to Look

Canadian blogger and journalist Wierenga addresses eating disorders and parental illness in this meandering, uneven memoir. Maddeningly, the book is not organized chronologically%E2%80%94darts from 2007, to 1998, to the early 1980s and back again. The patient reader who is willing to piece things together will learn that Wierenga grew up in a Christian family and developed an eating disorder at age 9; that her maternal grandmother committed suicide and her mother developed brain cancer; and that after marrying her late-adolescent love, Trenton, Wierenga eventually moved home to care for her mother. There are some well-written scenes: descriptions of her sexually awkward wedding night, as well as tending to her sick mother. But Wierenga has an unfortunate taste for slightly off-key imagery coupled with breathless sentence structure: "it all caught in the back of my throat, all the love songs and all the loneliness, it caught like a big wad of gum." At the end of the book, the reader will have traveled to a lot of places, but will not really know what the journey has added up to. (July)