A loving mother. A perfect family. A shock wave that could shatter everything.
Freya Braithwaite knows she is lucky. Nineteen years of marriage to a man who still warms her soul and two beautiful teenage daughters to show for it: confident Charlotte and thoughtful Lexi. Her home is filled with love and laughter.
But when Lexi’s struggles with weight take control of her life, everything Freya … life, everything Freya once took for granted falls apart, leaving the whole family with a sense of helplessness that can only be confronted with understanding, unity and, above all, love.
In this compelling and heart-wrenching new work by bestselling author Amanda Prowse, one ordinary family tackles unexpected difficulties and discovers that love can find its way through life’s darkest moments.
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How is it that this amazing woman can write such beautiful books that punch me in the gut every single time? Amanda Prowse is that rare writer who simply understand the way to develop characters such that you love them and you are angry with them and you just want to hold them and fix everything. But you can’t. They are broken, and until they reach their very lowest point, all we can do is watch the spiral with bated breath and the anticipation of knowing Prowse always mends it in the end. The Food of Love is simply wonderful and while the topic is difficult beyond belief, it must be read.
Anorexia. Bulimia. Any sort of issues with food that result is harming oneself. It comes seemingly from nowhere. And when it’s your own teenage daughter, and you are a food writer who’s done everything she can to teach her daughters healthy eating, it’s a heartwarming and perilous journey. Freya is a good mom, but she missed many signs. Lexi is savvy at hiding her problems. But when the school intervenes, Freya is shocked at their accusations. In time, she learns they were true. And Lexi knocks at Death’s door way too many times. Imagine putting your daughter in a facility where they tie her down and force her to eat food?
Emotions ran so high in this one, I was certain Lexi died. Freya and family write letters to Lexi in alternating chapters via hourly countdowns. Readers don’t know whether Lexi is coming home from the hospital or if her family is attending her funeral. The suspense nearly killed me, and I stopped myself three times from flipping ahead to the end to know before I got there. Prowse just slaps you and slaps you and slaps you until you can’t take it anymore — all in a good way. She understands human nature in a way many of us do not, and it always shines in her writing. I have three more of her books set in my TBR queue this year, and that will bring me to 12, about half her collection thus far. She writes faster than I can read, and that’s saying a lot! 🙂
Took me awhile to finish due to the serious nature. Felt like I learned a lot and thought it was very well written.
SPOILERS INCLUDED:
This is a story about anorexia. The horrifying, pervasive, immersively devastating illness of anorexia, and the author lays out the process and powerlessness of her characters’ journeys in painful detail and with tremendous passion and heart.
As much as you may think you know about the disease, the stomach-churning, revoltingly visceral and corporeal details of a child who spends every waking moment avoiding, analyzing, regurgitating, and rejecting food in the need to starve herself are brutal. Sickening. Horrifying. But then there’s really no other way to depict this disease, as it IS all those things.
The family at the center, dominated by the maternally-driven Freya, is a warm, cohesive, loving group at the story’s beginning. One of the most successful, if wrenching, elements of the book is following their steady downward trajectory as younger daughter, Lexi, becomes entrenched in the process of starvation; older daughter, Charlotte, functional and healthy, finds herself lonely and unattended as her parents fixate on saving their youngest, and father/husband, Lockie, struggles mightily to keep the entire family from fracturing beyond repair. The roller coaster nature of their journey as they stumble through the unfolding drama is shattering and difficult, and Prowse is courageously unvarnished in her depictions of exactly what they endure.
There are, however, certain parenting and medical choices that come across as problematic and we wonder: are we supposed to support and agree with those? Are they meant to stoke sympathy or rage? Not completely clear, and as one who knows nothing about anorexia but a fair amount about partnering and parenting, I got frustrated and annoyed several time throughout the book when Freya’s enabling, somewhat needy and pathetic behavior led her, as a wife and a mother, to behave like a hysterical, desperate teen. I get it, on some level, but we were taken there too often, to the point that I wanted to shake her, hard, and say, “man up, babe, this kid is DYING!”
My biggest issue with the book, however, is in the pacing of that trajectory and, sorry to say, the end. The book is weighted very heavily on the side of showing us, over and over, the dashing of hopes, the “one step forward, three steps back” aspect of what they experience. We witness the seemingly inexorable decline and disintegration of Lexi, in every way imaginable, with the attendant whiplash effects on the family as they continue to grasp hope only to be repeatedly slammed to the concrete. While all this feels authentic, that excruciating downward slide makes up the bulk of the book, interspersed with chapters comprised of sweet letters to Lexi written by the family… which lead to the sense — in what I presumed was an intended red herring –that success was not to be theirs. Right up until the last chapter, when Lexi is down to 63 pounds, with brittle bones, a damaged heart, checked into a mental medical facility, with seemingly no chance for survival, we mourn the imminence of that end, and then….
The epilogue arrives and, lo and behold, the family is all together on a sunny beach, the girls are bouncing around in glee; Lexi has, unfathomably, not only survived but flourished, and, it seems, we’re meant to applaud the fortitude and perseverance of all involved. To which I reacted: WHAT? How did THAT happen?
It’s not that I minded the author ending on a sunny note. She obviously had to choose SOME ending: whether to make this a cautionary tale in which the victim succumbs, an open-ended treatise in which we leave without knowledge of her fate, or a heart-warming wrap-up in which all’s well that ends well. The author chose the last, but the problem is: there was no support, no lead up, no foundation for that ending.
We saw, witnessed, read, experienced, none of it. After spending 98% of the book immersed in the horrors the family endured, we get NONE of Lexi’s healing process, none of what, finally, tipped her toward health; none of what she experienced as she transitioned from a mentally-ill, desperately delusional, minutes-from-death wreck to the happy, smiling teen bounding toward the waves at the book’s conclusion.
Frankly, I was stunned by that. It felt inauthentic and narratively shallow. That arc not only short-changed readers by leaving out those details, it was a disservice to the very important theme of understanding the illness in a real way. Without clarity about HOW this person beat anorexia, the book is left only as a “compelling depiction of the horrors of anorexia,” with a fluffy Hallmark ending slapped on the end.
So I leave this with 3 stars. It was well-written, touching at times, with well-defined characters, and a compelling theme, but the ending misses an opportunity to educate us on how the character gets to the sunny denouement the author chooses, diminishing its importance as an authentic narrative about anorexia.