Review By: Corinne Blair
Author: John Schu
Published: 2024, Candlewick Press
Genre: realistic fiction, free verse
Audience: 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Triggers: None
Summary:
But another voice inside me says,
We need help.
We’re going to die.
Jake volunteers at a nursing home because he likes helping people. He likes skating and singing, playing Bingo and Name That Tune, and reading mysteries and comics aloud to his teachers. He also likes avoiding people his own age . . . and the cruelty of mirrors . . . and food. Jake has read about kids like him in books—the weird one, the outsider—and would do anything not to be that kid, including shrink himself down to nothing. But the less he eats, the bigger he feels. How long can Jake punish himself before he truly disappears? A fictionalized account of the author’s experiences and emotions living in residential treatment facilities as a young teen with an eating disorder, Louder than Hunger is a triumph of raw honesty. With a deeply personal afterword for context, this much-anticipated verse novel is a powerful model for muffling the destructive voices inside, managing and articulating pain, and embracing self-acceptance, support, and love.
Review: This book is 513 pages. I started it one evening around 5pm and between dinner and a few breaks I was one by 10pm. I could not put it down. It is written in free verse, which I have found to love. I think more books should be written this way as I found myself tearing through it and would be so good for hesitant and struggling readers to feel success! This story was powerful. It is about a middle school boy dealing with anorexia, OCD and depression and also the loss of his grandmother. He gets so sick he has to go to an inpatient treatment facility and here we see him really struggle to get better. Some parts were hard to read, heartbreaking but ultimately it is a story of bravery and resilience. It is loosely based on the author’s experience, which is incredible. I think my favorite part was at the end, there is a part called six months later AND then a dear reader part written by the author. Here he tells the readers what happened next in Jake’s story because his life parallels Jake’s. I love when books not only wrap things up but give us a peak into character’s futures. I found it remarkable how attached I got to Jake. One may think that with free verse there is less because there are less words but I think they are that much more powerful.
