Stephanie Elliot

"The story of a teen girl's struggle with Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder and how love helps her on the road to recovery"--

Sad Perfect

Emi Gilmore 

Ahhh disappointment, my old friend, it's nice to see you. It's been awhile. 

 For a more detailed and better explanation about how problematic this book is, feel free to read this review  


 Warning:   I get incredibly personal in this review and I apologize in advance for it. I'm not usually this personal. I do talking about some stuff that I'm not usually open to sharing. Because's it hard for me to share as many people struggle to comprehend the way my brain works. Now, I'm used to people judging and not understanding, and you are free to do just that, but don't waste your time leaving negative comments. They will just be deleted. If there is something you want me to clarify or want to try to understand clearly, that's fine. I don't expect you to fully understand my thought process. Just don't be an asshole. 
 
I have no idea what fruit tastes like.

I’ve never actually been told if I have had fruit when I was still a toddler. I must have since it’s one of those food groups that parents like to force upon their child at a young age, but I don’t have any memories of me eating an apple or a pear or a pineapple or whatever. If I was to try to eat one today, if I was even able to bring it up to my mouth, I would probably have an anxiety attack and spend the rest of the day crying in my room. Instead, I eat a small cluster of about 6 or 7 different types of food. Whenever I am asked what I do eat, I usually reply with, “chicken strips, macaroni and cheese, cheese pizza, and most white bread products” because that’s is a huge portion of my everyday meals. 

That’s just my life. I hate food. I don't try new foods. I can't eat in front of strangers. I can't cook in front of strangers. Eating is often a chore for me. 

When I was around three or four, something happened, I’m not sure what exactly, that created an extremely negative association with trying new foods. My first memory of knowing that something is different with my eating habits happened when I was around four years old. It happened when I was at preschool, during Dr. Seuess day when lunch that day was green eggs and ham. I liked eggs, I liked ham, but the second I saw they were green I remember hysterically crying and shaking, refusing to eat. 

For the most part, as long as I’m not put in a situation where I have to eat in front of strangers and I avoid talking about food at all costs, it doesn’t control much of my life. People who know me and love me know about my eating habits and accept them for what they are. I’ve been like this for around fifteen years now, so I don’t think much about. It’s become part of who I am, just as much as I have brown hair and two siblings. 

I was always labeled a "picky eater" (a term I utterly hate with all my soul), but I would always wonder if it was something more. I had a cousin labeled a "picky eater" too, but she seemed to just prefer to eat what she really liked. She was able to try things at restaurants, while I wasn't able to. Now, I'm not saying my eating habits are worse than hers or anything. I don't know what is going on in her mind and I will never know. She could be having an internal struggle inside her mind like I am. She might just be better at hiding her emotions than I am. But I would watch her try something without showing anxiety like I would, and it would make me feel degraded almost. If we were both picky eaters, then why wasn't I able to eat something new without feeling like my insides were going to explode right out of me. 

I didn’t think about it being an eating disorder until it was brought to my attention a few years back. I figured it might be a mental disorder, for why else couldn’t I bring myself to eat like a normal human? But it is, technically, an eating disorder. It’s called Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, or ARFID. It’s a newly diagnosed disorder that usually begins at an incredibly young age. ARFID, while often called picky eating, is more than that. 

As a reader, I never thought I would see such a topic portrayed in a YA novel. ARFID is a normal part of my life, I never thought of it as being anything special, as my life is incredibly mundane. So back in December, when I discovered that  Sad Perfect  was being published, which told the story of a 16-year-old girl with ARFID, I was absolutely shocked. I was worried about this aspect of my life would be portrayed inaccurately. I portrayed my worries in a (pre)review, and I was fortunate enough to have the author, Stephanie Elliott, reach out to me. We communicated back and forth through email for a few days, where I was able to learn that the book was inspired by her own daughter’s experience with ARFID. Stephanie Elliott is a very sweet person, and no way does this review reflect my opinion of her at all.

I had higher expectations for  Sad Perfect  then I probably should have had, and I was disappointed in many different ways. 

There are many parts of the book where I felt like my own thoughts about food were accurately portrayed. Thoughts that I have never been able to describe myself, and that I actually appreciated. 
 
  “You couldn’t explain to Alex why being at social events with food made you anxious. How you couldn’t really eat much of anything, and how thinking about food made you sick sometimes, and how even, if you were in the wrong frame of mind, watching other people eat a hamburger could make your own stomach churn. 
 
Pea’s thoughts on food, at least in my opinion, were the most accurate representation of anything in this book. I’ve tried before to describe to people how watching others eat, whether it be in person or on television, can make me physically sick. This book did it in a way that I’ve never been able to before. 

However, I think one major flaw of this book is that it was written in second person. Not only did it get very annoying, very fast, but I felt that it caused a barrier to form between the author and the 
reader. Instead of showing us what it is like to live with ARFID, we were just told. 

We were told that Pea didn’t like food. 

We were told that this food made her anxious. 

We were told that the “monster” controls her life.

Never once were we shown, in detailed, the effects the eating disorder has on Pea’s life. 

ARFID, for me, is more than my negative thoughts on food. Though ARFID really doesn’t control me that much throughout my daily life, there are times where it does take the reigns that I wish was portrayed in this book. 

Because ARFID, for me, is crying in the middle of the grocery store because I can’t remember if I like hot chocolate or not. 

It’s locking myself in a bathroom, trying to calm myself down, during a work party after they start serving dinner.

It’s the agonizingly long minute of gagging up a tiny bite of food I accidentally ate, and the days it takes to get that taste out of my mouth. 

Yet, this kind of thing was never shown in the book. Instead, we were just told what it was like to have ARFID and deal with it on a daily basis. I feel like Elliott really had the chance to portray something so real and dimensional, and yet she made it as flat as possible. 

But let’s be real here, this entire book was just so flat. There were so many things going on in this book, that I wish Elliott really just focused on one or two things and developed them further. Towards the later part of the novel, the MC, Pea, was checked into a facility for suicide prevention. That entire thing was a mess. Not only did it shift the entire plot of the book about one about this unknown eating disorder to one about depression, it just made me question the entire structure of the book. I appreciate mental health representation in books, I really do, but I also appreciate stability in what I read. I picked up a book about a girl and her struggles with ARFID, and I expected that to be the main theme of the book, but in just a mere few pages, that was stripped away. It wouldn’t have even been a problem if the ARFID and depression aspects were woven together. The focus of this book became so nonexistent. 

	 And the entire facility was also extremely unbelievable, so much so that I can’t even begin to describe it. I’m not even going to try. 

Let’s talk about Pea as a character. She wasn’t much of one to begin with, to be honest. The only part of Pea’s personality was her eating disorder. I get that it is a big part of her life, but it doesn’t mean it is the only part of her life. We were told that she was a great artist, but we were never shown. Her dialogue was monotone. Her actions were predictable. There was no depth to her at all. I wish Elliott took the time to expand her as a person, to make her more than her struggles and show that she was a normal human being.
	
And the few things that we did get about her personality were incredibly negative. She was a judgemental, slut-shamer who wasn’t like ~~most girls~~. 
 
Let’s just pull up those receipts. Shall we? This entire book was full of them. 
 
  You hate the girls your own age, except for Jae. They’re mostly high-pitched girls who only care about how many Instagram likes they have or how many Twitter retweets they get and you wonder what makes them so popular. Most days you wonder what it would be like if the universe were different.  

*Sigh* Most days I wonder what it would be like if the universe were different and girls hating girls for no reason didn't exist but idk that could just be me. 

  But Jae, Jae means the world to you. She’s nothing like the girls at school who live and breathe by how many likes they get on Instagram.  
 
If you can't tell, Pea is obsessed with Instagram. 

  "You kneel on your bed and and emit a little girlie squeal and then want to shove it back into your mouth, because you sound like one of those stupid girls. You don’t want to be a stupid girl."   

WHAT EVEN IS THE PURPOSE OF GIRL HATE???? At this point, about 25 pages or so into the book, I was beyond #done. 

  
At Majestic Mini-Golf, Ben pays for the eighteen-hole course, then grabs two putters. He chooses an orange ball and you choose a green one. 

“I thought you would have picked a pink or yellow ball,” he says. 

“Why?” you ask.

“I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I expect girls to do, pick girlie colors, but you’re different. I should have known better. That you’d pick the unexpected color.” 

"Well, green is my favorite color, so I wanted the green one," you say. 

"Aren't you feisty tonight," Ben says, laughing.  

This quote bugged me more than it probably should. But obviously, only girls who don't like the color pink are valid. 

And how does that make her feisty???? Just no. Please stop. 

 I don't get why pink gets so much hate? And why it has its own gender? Pink is a fucking awesome color, appreciate it. 

  “Oh! Get this! Ben said he’ll watch The Fault in Our Stars with me sometime.” 

“The Fault in Our Stars, really?” Jae asks. 

“He says he wants to see it.” 

“What guy wants to watch Fault in Our Stars?” Jae says. 

“I know,” you say.

 “Wow.”
 
 
Because, obviously, you gender determines what movies you want to watch and which movies you shouldn’t watch. 
 
  “Favorite flower?” 

“Definitely white carnations.”

 “Not red roses?” 

“So cliché.” 
 
I like red roses, so I took this personally. I mean, pink roses are better, but as we learned earlier, pink isn't a valid color. 

  As you wait, you busy yourself checking out the latest from the infamous Instagrammers. Yep, they’re still there, posting selfies in sports bras and Nike workout shorts, looking slutty as usual. You wonder if their moms have any clue about the pictures they post and the comments they get. 
 
Pea's really obsessed with the girls on Instagram if you couldn't tell. 

 The staffer has a name tag that says DAMIAN and you can’t help but think of some devil-worship guy because of his name.  

This though. I just don't understand the correlation between "Damian" and "devil-worship." 

Just wtf. 

Then let's bring in Ben. He was an utterly useless character who was even more bland than Pea. Were we supposed to root for their love? Because there was literally no chemistry between these two characters. Approximately 32 seconds after meeting him, Pea was actually calling him the most perfect person to ever exist. Then about 3095 seconds after meeting, they were declaring their love for each other. Then all of a sudden Pea was lying to her parents and sneaking out in the middle of the night to meet him, which would make sense if her relationship with Ben was portrayed as damaging, but it wasn't. It was the worst, incredibly unhealthy relationship I have ever read about. 

Also, something I don't want to get into much detail about because then I'll be ranting for the next 30 years, Ben was pretty much only there to "cure" Pea. Let's pull up one or two more receipts, shall we?

  "He’s the only one who seems to keep the monster at a lull."  

Because, obviously, a boy can heal all the problems in life. 

  “What kind of sandwich is that?” you ask him. 

“It’s turkey with cheese.” 

“I wonder what would happen if I took a bite.”

He lifts his eyebrows. “I thought you were a vegetarian?”

 “Self-imposed,” you say. You both laugh. 

He hands you the sandwich and you look at it, and then take a bite. It’s a small bite, mostly bread, but there’s definitely some turkey and cheese in your mouth.

You chew. 

You consider. 

You try very hard not to think about what’s in your mouth because if your brain and your mouth work too hard together then you know you’ll gag. 

You swallow quickly. 

It tastes like … it tastes like nothing.   

Urghhhhh I could literally be hanging out with my one true love, Kaz Brekker, and he wouldn't in any way change perspective on food. 

About two months ago, it took me three days to eat a bag of animal crackers because I could remember if I liked them or not. I stared at these animal crackers constantly. I wanted to eat them, I really did, but I knew there was a brand of crackers I didn't like and I couldn't remember if it was thsi brand or not. 

It took me three days to try them. Three days. And I was pretty proud of that, to be honest. There's times when I buy a new brand of my favorite food, mac and cheese, and it'll sit in my fridge for weeks before I can bring myself to heat it up. Sometimes, I'm not even able to eat it even then. 

So when I read the scene, quoted above, when Pea is able just to try something like that, without any hesitation. Without having an internal struggle. Without having not one bit of anxiety, just a little brain struggle and that's it. I actually laughed out loud, and couldn't stop. 

That's just not how it goes. 

Then, at the end, we have this quote, which pissed me off beyond words. 


  You are certain that the monster didn’t really exist. He was everything around you, surrounding you. He was anxiety. He was depression. He was your brother. He was your parents when they were aggravating you. He was how you  felt  when you were hungry, or angry, or sad. He was the food that was keeping you from living your lfie this whole time. You unconsciously created the monster, someone else to blame, because you didn’t want to take on the responsibilities of fixing what was broken.

The monster was never real.

“I’m ready,” you tell Shayna. “I’m going to take the responsibility to get well, and not blame something else for my problems.”

Of course, you’ll need Shayna’s help, and with time, patience, and determination, you’ll succeed. You’re sure of it... 

Thanks you, Elliott, for telling me that my ED is just a problem that I have that is my fault, a slight bump in the road. And because of that, I'm not living my life the way it was suppose to be living it. 

Not only that, but my anxiety over foods doesn't exist. The fact that I can't try new foods without an anxiety attack isn't real. Oh, and also, my social anxiety doesn't exist either. What about my brother, who I love more than anything in this world, and struggles with anxiety too? His mental health problems don't exist either? 

Thanks Stephanie Elliott, our problems have just been magically cured. 

The fact that our brains don't work properly isn't our faults. Our problems are very much real and valid. 

Way to victim blame. 

I'm just disgusted. 

To be honest, this book made me feel so shitty about myself. I have spent years building up confidence in my eating habits, and that was almost destroyed by 300 pages.  Sad Perfect  literally made me like my eating habits are wrong. And that my eating habits are all that matter in who I am as a person. So, as a result, who I am as a person is wrong. And that isn't true. 

I had to remind myself that there isn't anything wrong with me. Yes, I have ARFID, but no, it doesn't determine who I am. It's not my fault that over fifteen years ago, something happened to me that left a negative scar and altered my perspective on food. It's a part of me, but it's not who I am. I'm a happy, healthy women. 

And I am okay.

Malu Lightwood

I really wanted to like this book, since it was the only book I've seen that talks about ARFID
However, I found it very lacking. For starters, the writing style made the book very awkward to read, and it made the main character appear even more childish than she is.
Also, this book had the same problem than plenty of books about EDs, where the romance is the main focus of the story, instead of the actual recovery.
Overall, I think this book was a huge letdown, even though it had an amazingly interesting subject matter, it fell short.

Laura

I want to start off by talking about the most unique aspect of this book, by far, and that is its point of view. I don't know if I mentioned before, I might have in my We, the Drowned review but I love unique points of view. I love when books experiment with different ways of telling stories, and have read several successful books that make use of first person plural. Sad Perfect makes use of the elusive second person singular. This was a bold choice. There's a reason why second person singular isn't used often, and that is because, simply put, it's hard. It's hard not only to successfully write it but and also have it make sense with the plot. There are insanely talented veteran authors who can't pull it off. 

So does this book succeed? In my opinion, no. For a variety of reasons, one of which being that, as with all POVs, but especially the not as common ones, you need a reason to choose second person. Whenever authors are trying to decide what point of view to use, they should take a good long look at what kind of story they want to write and which POV would work best. I've dabbled in second person (wow, I sound like I take myself super-seriously there), and find it particularly useful when writing description. In my opinion, second person works best in small doses- short stories or novellas-, with lengthy descriptions of towns and their denizens or character studies or any story really when the narrator is not necessarily the focus of the novel or the narrator is perhaps young and/or disconnected from what is going on around him. It doesn't seem like Elliot had a particular reason why she wanted to go with second person, except that it was interesting and original and would hopefully set her book apart from other eating disorder books. I suppose maybe she thought the choice of second person would mimic how Pea feels disconnected from her disease, like how Shusterman used second person in Challenger Deep to show that Caden's mental disorder has escalated to the point where he can no longer differentiate between himself and the rest of the world, but if that was the case in Elliot's book she would have changed POVs by the end of the novel.

My second main reason why this didn't work is that Elliot simply doesn't have the talent for second person, at least not yet. She seems to think that second person means inserting you wherever I would fit. As a result, half the time reading I found myself subconsciously inserting I in place of you. Because I didn't feel like I was in Pea's shoes at all. Pea had this odd mix of characterization, where I felt like I knew just enough about her that I couldn't relate, but not enough to particularly feel any which way about her. Half the time when reading I would see a statement like "you're too tall" or something along those lines I would think for a split second "no I'm not" before remembering I was reading a book. Maybe I couldn't relate to Pea because there was too much physical description and also the way she acted was just not me. Because I'm not tall, cute perfect boys don't just magically materialize to fall in love with me, and I would rather rip my teeth out than watch The Fault in Our Stars (I would have chosen Annie Hall, because Harold and Maude isn't exactly first date material). I think in this book I must have an amazing rack, because why else would someone that perfect be flirting with me? It's strange in that Elliot gave us a lot of physical description, some observations as to how we are supposed to feel as Pea, but almost no personality. I get that we're probably supposed to insert our own personality, but I don't know. It just didn't work, and again I was kept thinking that I would never act like that or I would never say that. I wasn't a very good sixteen year old girl when I was a sixteen year old girl. I don't have an Instagram and I always feel so fake whenever I try to use slang, like a 40 year old mom trying to act cool around her teenagers (what is it that you kids say now? On fleck? Is that still a thing?). I think the only thing I could relate to was how Pea hated both The Catcher in the Rye and Harry Potter, two things that rarely get hate and I appreciate it when they do.

Continue reading this review on my blog here: http://bookwormbasics.blogspot.com/20...

Jordan Peet

Nicole Lambert

Sixteen-year-old Pea looks normal, but she has a secret: she has Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, which means she can’t eat very much because nutritious foods frighten her. Having ARFID is like having a monster inside of her, one that dictates what she can eat, what she does and who she socializes with. This monster is growing and controlling more than just her food issues – it’s causing anxiety, depression and thoughts that she doesn’t want to have. When she falls crazy-mad in love with Ben, she hides her disorder from him, pretending that she’s fine. At first, everything really does feel like it’s getting better with him around, so she stops taking her anxiety and depression medication. And that's when the monster really takes over her life. Just as everything seems lost and hopeless, Pea finds in her family, best friend, and Ben the support and strength that she needs to learn that her eating disorder doesn’t have to control her. SAD PERFECT is a heart-wrenching debut from Stephanie Elliot. A Margaret Ferguson Book

Sad Perfect

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