Like most issue books, this is not an easy read, but it's poignant and transcendent as Charlie breaks more and more before piecing herself back together. Through intense, diarylike chapters chronicling Charlie's journey, the author captures the brutal and heartbreaking way 'girls who write their pain on their bodies' scar and mar themselves, either succumbing or surviving. Feeling rejected, Charlie, an artist, is drawn into a destructive new relationship with her sexy older co-worker, a 'semifamous' local musician who's obviously a junkie alcoholic.

But things don't go as planned in the Arizona desert, because sweet Mikey just wants to be friends.

After spending time in treatment with other young women like her-who cut, burn, poke, and otherwise hurt themselves-Charlie is released and takes a bus from the Twin Cities to Tucson to be closer to Mikey, a boy she 'like-likes' but who had pined for Ellis instead. Seventeen-year-old Charlie Davis, a white girl living on the margins, thinks she has little reason to live: her father drowned himself her bereft and abusive mother kicked her out her best friend, Ellis, is nearly brain dead after cutting too deeply and she's gone through unspeakable experiences living on the street. 13-adult)Īfter surviving a suicide attempt, a fragile teen isn't sure she can endure without cutting herself. With a page-ripping plot and realistic character development, Henry’s funny, heartwarming tale of unlikely rebels soars: an auspicious debut. But when Michael goes rogue and acts alone, his entire world is threatened. Together this group of iconoclasts forms “Heretics Anonymous,” a deliciously secret society united in the belief, “That all people, regardless of what they worship, who they love, and what they think / Have a right to exist, and a right to be heard.” The hypocrisy-busting acts of rebellion the group engages in range from hilariously annotating the school’s sex-ed DVD to circulating an alternative school paper challenging the dress code and exposing the firing of a popular teacher. Clare’s norm: Lucy, a devout Colombian-American Catholic bent on reforming the church Avi, a gay, semi-observant Jew Eden, a Celtic Reconstructionist Polytheist with Irish heritage and Max, a Korean-American Unitarian. Luckily, Michael soon falls in with others bucking the St. Clare’s, the best private-and Catholic-school in town.

Reeling from his family’s frequent moves, and now forced to change schools less than two months into 11th grade, Michael is resentful at being at the mercy of his father’s job and worrying about how he, an atheist, will fit in at St. This engrossing bildungsroman centers on the travails of white, first-person narrator Michael Ausman. Teen angst and religious reflection cross paths in this insightful tale of self-discovery.

Heretics anonymous